What is wrong with my backup plan?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frank
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Frank

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.
 
If you are just wanting to back up the data, and if the 3 machines are
networked together, the easiest for the person doing the backups is to make
one of the machines a file server (no big deal, just keep all the data files
on that machine, in shared folders) and put a tape drive into that machine.
Setup ntbackup to run every night and all the person doing the backup has to
do is change out the tape before going home for the day and check the backup
log for errors in the morning. Tape drives often come with a backup s/w
package that is better than ntbackup.

Use at least three tapes, or better yet, 5, and label them Monday, Tuesday,
etc. Tape drives (use IDE, not SCSI) and tapes will be more expensive than
using an external hard drive, but they are simpler to use, permit off-site
storage and you aren't placing all of your backup eggs in one basket.
 
Frank said:
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.
Click to expand...

It is a good plan. I can only see one possible flaw. You are relying mostly
on one hard drive for backups. NTBackup will work over the network. I would
schedule each computer to backup to a share on a different computer each
night. If you are just backing up data each backup shouldn't take too long.
You will have to play with the schedule so they don't overlap. I would also
use the USB drive and/or CD to store some backups off site.

Kerry
 
Frank said:
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.
Click to expand...

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
 
The easist way i can think of ( If she has a Router ) is to purchase a NAS (
Network Attached Storage ) I just got one from a local retailer for $266 it
is a western digital that has 2 usb port and it can also work as a printer
server ( I have setup one in my home system i have 4 pc's and a nas setup as
a print server 2 pc's are wireless ) it works great and i back up my systems
to the nas all the time.
 
Many thanks for the responses. Networking is definitely in the future,
but I work a more-than-fulltime job, and I just want to get these
backups started now. I like the idea of the NAS, particularly since
she'll want to share a printer as well. Everything critical could be
stored in one folder that could be copied to DVR daily for off-site
storage.
 
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