[ale] Low-end tapedrives for SOHO environment

[runman at speedfactory.net]

Disks are cheaper yet.  Set up another IDE hard drive in a removable
caddy and backup to that.  Caddies are about $12 - $20.  Set up a cron
job or use bacula or SAMBA or something that came with the OS (I think
Suse and/or KDE have something) to do the backup.  Do the backup,
shutdown, take the caddy and hard drive out and go home.  Easy off-site
backup.  If you don't want to do an automated backup then just
copy/past/shutdown/remove caddy/go home.

Greg

On 3/19/2004, "Bridges, Doug" <DBridges at alston.com> wrote:

>My father-in-law uses a CD writer to backup all of his data at his small business (a college bookstore).  It works very well and it is extremely cheap..  I doubt there is need to do full backups on the computers your small business uses, just back up the needed data files for the programs they use.  I would be surprised if these files exceeded the 640 MB storage of a CD or the 4.7 GB storage of a DVD.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org]On Behalf Of
>griffisb at bellsouth.net
>Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 3:14 PM
>To: ale at ale.org
>Subject: [ale] Low-end tapedrives for SOHO environment
>
>
>I didn't want to hijack the Bacula thread, but did want to discuss various options for tape backups for the small office/home office environment. Particularly for a charity (church) on a budget.
>
>I saw the discussions on good tape drive units, but know a church (or home user) would have problems justifying 1K or so. How do the IDE tape drives stack up as far as reliability? I saw that you can pick up a Seagate 10/20Gig IDE Tape Drive unit for $184 or so online. That is closer to my budget. Even saw them for less. Looks like tapes are in the $34 range. 
>
>Are these suitable for smaller networks? I was thinking of home use, backing up my laptops to my Samba desktop, then doing a tape backup from the Samba server. I also REALLY liked the external harddrive solution, and that might work better for at a lower cost.
>
>Assuming a tape drive for a small office or charity - would you schedule full backups weekly, and rotate 4 sets of tapes? Would you schedule bi-monthly and rotate 2 sets of tapes? I'm trying to get an idea of pricing, to determine how many tapes I would need.
>
>My thought would be: full backups weekly, rotate 4 sets of tapes (if budget permits). Then do daily incremental backups. My main concerns would be PCs that payroll is stored on, and the PC baptisms, marriages and deaths are stored on. Right now everything went from cards into a database, but the database is not backed up. It took several months to go from cards to database, and the project is not complete. It would be a pain to lose it.
>
>So, for the church:
>1 IDE tape drive = appr. $200 (w/ shipping)
>
>5 PC's @ 20 Gig per disk = 100 gigs of data   (I would need to size it again to validate) 
>
>Full backups weekly, x 4 sets uncompressed = 400 gigs, or 40 tapes = appr. $1,360
>
>$1,360 + $200 = YIKES!!!! Maybe the external disk drive is a better idea! Or maybe rotate 2 sets of tapes. Or maybe only backup 2 critical PC's. How do you guys price out back ups, and is the above pricing anywhere near accurate? 
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________________
>
>NOTICE:  This e-mail message and all attachments transmitted with it 
>may contain legally privileged and confidential information intended 
>solely for the use of the addressee.  If the reader of this message is not 
>the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any reading, 
>dissemination, distribution, copying, or other use of this message or its 
>attachments is strictly prohibited.  If you have received this message in 
>error, please notify the sender immediately by telephone 
>(404-881-7000) or by electronic mail (postmaster at alston.com), and 
>delete this message and all copies and backups thereof.  Thank you.
>_______________________________________________________
>
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
>