I was to propose a Small business backup solution to my clients that have a Windows SBS 2003.
I am thinkng about having the server backup to an external HD (either USB or NAS).every night and then have another external drive do a backup once a week.
Seagate says that they do not support hooking up any of their External drives to a Windows Server 2003 OS.
Can anyone recommend a solution.
Also in order to backup SQL will I have to use a 3rd party application like Backup exec?
I assume your talking about just the data here and not SBS as well.
What I do for my clients is use an Iomega Rev drives for the bulk of the backing up / daily offsites, however I use my own script which effectively uses robocopy to find files created / modified in the last 24 hrs and copies those to a temp folder, then the folder is compressed using 7zip (command line) and renamed to the current time (batch file code). This gives me my incrementals. These are then copied to which ever backup you use.
I also have 2 external hard drives used on offsite rotation at the end of the week purely from a disaster recovery point of view. The problem with backups is in the case of a fire, you have to replace the drive before you can read the data. A USB HD can be plugged into any XP PC and the data read. This means a company could be up and running within a few hours rather than days. You can always loan a PC or laptop!!
With SQL, (depending on the version) you can set the maintenance backup to write to a REV daily or USB HD weekly. In the event of a disaster you would need to have a replacement server before you can access / restore the data.
I tried BE and found it to be flaky. NTbackup is ok - to a point, I generally use it for exchange and system state, then the files are copied the backup directly. I also don't use tape any more because restoring simply takes too long. I have 1 client that has over 1Tb of data so they have a 3rd level backup - a 2Tb NAS which stores everything, dailies, weeklies and monthlys. this is perhaps over kill, but their staff often delete files and its proved to be the quickest option for fast restores.
I hope this has helped, but if you want more info, just ask!!
Terry
Personally I re-direct all mydoc folders etc to the server and then just back up the server to USB hard disks. Simple, easy to support and effective. Also, if you have shadow copies turned on on the server then most user errors can be recovered by clicking on the file / folder and looking at previous versions.
thanks
David
(c)David Overton 2006-23