Re: Small business thinking about backing up data, having a server and 2-3 users - is SBS2003 right for them?

Hi, the 12Gb tape drive (you mentioned in above post) is a bit small and pricey at £300 - you wont have much data I assume.

From experience you quickly outgrow tape capacity. A 36-72 DAT unit is £289 + VAT.

With newer setups is actually well worth thinking about small external disks for backup - say 80Gb at £70 - £90 ea.

XP Home can access SBS ok - just need to create matching user name and password at each end. Most everything basic (files/printers) will work - more involved things like Exchange have some issues but work in the main (but not sure you will be using that).

The 2 wireless cards in each PC sounds involved - what are you trying to achieve there?



Derek wrote:
"Frank" <fwhorf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1145281752.110538.173500@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If it were me, I'd just setup a workgroup and a inexpensive firewall
with VPN built in.
2 xp home, can they even connect to the network?
I'd use the email provided by the internet provider.
For backups if it's a small amount of data I'd even go R/W Cdrom.
I had a friend who owns a small garage, they called up a company that
wanted to do some thing similular and they bocked at the price tag.
We took a computer that was not being use loaded XP on it and created a
share.
Then added all 3 computers to the same work group and mapped the share
on each computer.
Then they just backup to Rewritable CD's rotating weekly.

I guess it depends on the budget.

Regards,
Frank


Thats sort of what we're trying to do in a way that we hope will mean we
have reliabiltity, backups and enough speed to host the application. We're
not sure if that's what we will have, but its what we're aiming for! ;-)

Server (£1300 inc OS and install) - has SBS2003 - going to host main
application and it's data, and back this up each night to tape (£350).

Existing 2-3 XP Home PCs - need these to access the application/data on the
Server - do we have to upgrade to XP Pro (£100 ea) in order to do this? Can
we get away with shared folder access?

We have also bought 1 extra wireless router and 2 wireless cards for each pc
with the intention of having 2 cards in the server and 2 cards in each pc so
we could have 2 seperate networks. This costs is about £60 for the router
and £30 for each card, total of about £300.

Grand total of £1300 + £350 + £300 = £1950 on parts, add some extra for
cheap labour = £2500 all inc.

Regards,
Derek.


.

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