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Backing Up Laptops In a Small Business?
Bithmus writes "I have been tasked with finding a way for our company to handle our laptop backups. We currently have nightly backups of our servers, but no backups of laptops. In our business we develop, implement, and sell another company's software; I guess that makes us a Valued Added Reseller. During development our consultants will create copies of a customer's database on MSDE on their laptops. If a hard drive crashes, all of the work done on that laptop is lost. There are other files that need to be saved, but the databases are really the important items. Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening. What do Slashdot readers do to protect data on laptops or computers outside of a local network?"
For a small business? Probably simple file synchronization. Right-click on a network drive and pick "Make Available Offline." You'll still have to train people to store their shtuff on the network, but at least that way they'll have access to it even if they're not on the network.
Of course, you might run into some issues with files being locked and such, but you're probably going to have that anyway unless you go with either a big expensive solution or you just get people to use SQL server databases instead.
However, just because it needs to be said...
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
If you were a big company, you could probably buy something expensive to mitigate the risk, but it still wouldn't be a good idea. At my big company, we use Connected DataProtector, and I hate it. Once a day, it runs a backup of my laptop and everything on my machine comes to a grinding halt for five to ten minutes. Oh, and it doesn't back up files in use (you know, like MSDE files under development), so a lot of stuff doesn't get backed up anyway.
Maybe you should be worrying about all your customers data floating around random laptops...
Directly put your customers data on big boxes at the office... let people remote desktop in and work. No longer will you have a backup problem for laptops - nor a security problem.
For a small business? Probably simple file synchronization. Right-click on a network drive and pick "Make Available Offline." You'll still have to train people to store their shtuff on the network, but at least that way they'll have access to it even if they're not on the network.
This is the right idea, but I smell a major WTF at this company. It sounds like the developers aren't using version control. They really just need to set up a repository for each project (SVN is my default recommendation, but something with better support for binary files would be useful here) and just back up the repositories.
After all, I am strangely colored.
BackupPC keeps track of a device's ping history. If the device only comes in during the day, after a couple of days the system will start backing it up as soon as it connects to the network.
I use it to back up the LAN, portables, and PCs connecting via VPN -- given that it can back up via RSYNC, SSH and SAMBA, pretty much anything with a HD connected to the network gets put into the system.
The backups are also mirrored for off-site storage so there's always an in-house revision system and an emergency remote restore point. The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB HDD (make sure to mirror).