Re: What is wrong with my backup plan?
- From: Malke <notreally@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:34:19 -0800
Frank wrote:
> A little background. My wife runs a shop with 3 XP computers. She is
> not computer oriented, and everything needs to be very easy. I'm
> considering buying a USB drive of adequate capacity to use NTBackup to
> backup business data every day to the USB drive. Each computer would
> have its own folder, and under that folder there would be a folder for
> Monday ~ Friday. That would give us 5 backups for each computer at
> all
> times. Another option would be to use the date (20051215), and I
> could write end of month, end of year, etc. to CDs as I deem
> necessary.
>
> Thanks for any input -- positive or negative. Other options would
> also be entertained bearing in mind that to make this happen it has to
> be very easy and convenient.
Here's one way I set up small business clients. Note that I don't use
NTBackup because I don't like backups to be in a proprietary format.
Ideally you would add a 4th computer to do nothing but be a file server.
It can be inexpensive although my preference is for it to have two hard
drives. That machine must have a CD-RW drive, although with the cost of
DVD-RW drives so reasonable now, I would put one in this machine. For
such a small business, you can use XP Pro instead of a real server
operating system. You might even be able to get away with XP Home,
although if I were doing it I would use Pro.
Then do not allow anyone to save anything to their local workstations.
All data should be saved in user folders on the file server. At the
same time, run SecondCopy as a backup program on the server. Have SC
funnel all data to *one* folder on the second hard drive called
something clever like "SC Backup". You can set SC to do multiple
backups by day if you like. Finally, someone in the office will burn
that data to a DVD-R or CD-R. There will only be one folder for them to
burn so that makes life very simple.
If you don't want to buy a 4th computer, you can do something similar by
using an external usb hard drive connected to one of the workstations
and running SC on it. Back up the data by burning to DVD/CD-R weekly.
You may want to have a local professional set you up, but I can assure
you that my small business clients find it very easy to back up their
data this way and the usefulness has been proved when we've had to do
disaster recovery. I wrote an article for my clients about disaster
recovery strategies recently that might be helpful for you. Here's the
link: http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page3.html#11-2-05
HTH,
Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
.
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