SOHO Backups?

[Ed Lawson]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 14:42:11 -0500
Ted Roche <tedroche at tedroche.com> wrote:

> 
> What's the current thinking on backup systems for small
businesses? I  
> have a client with a 6-year-old PC and tape drive, still
running  
> (tested and verified) tapes on rotation.

It all depends of the size of the backups as they will eliminate
some methods.  and the size of the backup depends on just what is
meant by a backup and what purpose will be servered by them.
For example, will they be used for a bare metal restore or only
to restore data?

What I hear and see on lists related to tech issues in law firms
is a trend toward using removable hard drives and simple mirrored
drives if not full on RAID arrays given the price point of hard
drives v. tape drives, etc. and the reliability of the various
methods.  

For simple backups, a USB drive would work.

Personally I use rsync to snyc removable drives that are
alternated every day for data backup and some archived files on
CDs and tape. Since it is relatively easy to do a bare metal
restore using Linux, I don't worry about that except for all the
config files and scripts that are unique to my server.

I have always found tape to do the job, but many do not and it is
falling out of favor from what I read.

Ed Lawson