When you're a small business and you can't afford to lose those accounting statements

[Planet]

When you're a small business and you can't afford to lose those accounting statements, graphic design illustrations or medical records, keeping all your files in one location isn't the best option. Storage industry insiders say backing up your information on external hard drives and CDs is important, but if your office or home is hit by a disaster, your data can be lost. Click here to read the rest of the story (http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/storage/features/article.php/3776661) then come right back here to discuss it.

[jaxbackup]

This really is a big problem companys see over, yes backing up is important and a great thing, but like me when somthing happens at your backup machines location your screwed,

that is why im starting a company here locally to deal with this.

Here is my plan, I will offer a client for them to backup there machines to my machine in the datacenter in a difrent state, and from there my server will backup to another in a difretn state aswell, also i will, twice a month visit there premises to do norton ghost backups of the drive/s in question.

So in theory, if there drive goes out, i visit install a new drive, run norton with there most recent image we have at the office, run the backup client and restore the most current update and bam the pc whould be as it was the night before the incident..

I think this would be a real valuable company for people in town.. im thinking about offering it statewide, but im not shure about the nortton backups.. maybe i could ship them an external drive and guide them to let me rdp in and do it then they ship it back free of charge once a month?

but anyways, yes backing up locally or even on a drive to take home will not protect you if a tornado or earthquake or somthing happens.

[Planet]

Is your plan to create the image backups during the off hours of the business? What about all the data that is created or changed during that two week period if a drive were to fail on the 13th day?

[ua549]

Before I retired, I backed up file system deltas to tape. That was prior to the days of other removable media. I put the tapes in a locking bank bag and dropped them in the bank's night drawer. Without a bank bag key, the bank just held the bag until it was retrieved. That was and is a no cost service for a bank's commercial account holders.

Today there are so many options for backups, I wonder why it is not done. At home I have used hot swap RAID 5 + 1 and RAID 1. With spare drives, one can simply pull the mirror for off site storage and plug in a fresh set of spares for the mirror. The mirror will rebuild itself overnight and there are no long processing times to copy data to several plastic discs.

Most businesses that lose their records never recover. I always recommend an on-site 2 hour rated data safe for critical business records. No, they are not inexpensive, but how much is a business worth.

[jaxbackup]

Yes exactly, I will use gotoexpress to do unattended login and create the image overnight, I will then copy it to the external drive I supply. Once a month I will go and exchange the drive with another which will take a mere 2 or 3 minutes.

As to you asking what happens to there files if the drive fails on the 13th day before I do the image, well im also installing a client that backs up all user files to my servers every few minutes it uses in file delta, basically it uploads the seed file then only the changes, also it checks all the selected folders, file, and file types every few minutes.

The image is basically to save them from reinstalling the os and drivers and software and settings. once I reload the disc image to a new drive or new pc, I then open my client and restore all there file from the last backup which should only be a few minutes behind when there drive went out.

So essentially it should be pretty safe.