Small business backups solutions?

[Ben Scott]

On Feb 5, 2008 9:24 AM, Dan Coutu <coutu at snowy-owl.com> wrote:
> I have a small client (30 employees) using Linux servers that is
> struggling to find a robust and reliable backup solution that provides
> bare-metal recovery capability without costing over $10K.

  tar provides bare-metal recovery and is free and reliable.  :)

> The primary challenge so far has been hardware. They used to use 30Gb
> tapes but now that the servers are bigger this doesn't work.

  You can get a LTO-4 drive from Dell for $3200.  400 GB native
(uncompressed) capacity.  Tapes are around $110 ($0.275/GB).

  Alternatively, the "external hard drive" solution is popular.  With
750 GB disks going for $160 ($0.213/GB), they're cheaper than tape,
even with the cost of the enclosure.  And eSATA can be pretty darn
fast.  And then you just need "rsync" or even "cp" instead of tar.

> I've tried to use the Iomega REV ...

  In my experience, IOMega makes crap and always has.  I know this
because I own several of their products, and have worked with hundreds
more.

-- Ben