Hey Hey,

I'm looking for some advice on back-up solutions. As many of you know, I recently started a new position and I'm in the process of making several changes. One is going to be the method of backup..

Currently we have a couple of 20/40GB tape drives and Retrospect 6 Single Server Edition (along with agents for all our PCs and Macs). The problem is we do a lot of graphics design (primarily graphics design actually) so backup is rather important. The backup is also done during the day because of the frequency with which we have to swap tapes, which means the load on the server is doubled and files are changing as the backups occur.

My initial suggest was to switch to a large solution... initially an 80/208 from Sony or a 120/240 Autoloader from Quantum. The problem is my current software supports neither of these drives (which I didn't find out until after)... Since I'd already received the quotes (roughly $1700 Canadian for either of those solutions) when I was in a meeting with my boss, I mentioned the price and he was happy with it... Now that I've been informed that those won't work with the software I'm in hot water... So far the cheapest tape drive that I've located as a replacement is $2900 Canadian (It's the Sony StorStation AIT-1 Lib-81). However I've found a couple today that look decent and I've seen online for under $1000 USD and they will work with the software. The other alternative is to move to a new backup software solution, however with 20 agents (mixed platform) and the server that could be very costly. The other solution which was the original option provided by the outside IT agency my company deals with and that's USB Hard Drives for back-up. Obviously they can't be easily taken offsite without too much risk of damage (compared to tapes anyways)... so a fire proof safe was included in the suggestion.

So I'm looking for feedback on which road you would travel. You have to figure we back-up about 10-12GB of mail, 130GB of working files (Graphics, Word, etc) plus the My Documents/Desktop/Favourites of all the employees... can vary from 1GB to 20GB... I'd like to see daily backups of everything (most employees work directly of their own harddrives) but if nothing else I'd at least like to see the file server backed up daily....

What do you all use for your current solutions? Are there many security implications (something the IT provider mentioned) with taking the tapes off site? Which method of back-up do you prefer or do you like/dislike what you currently have?

Peace,
HT