Back-Up

[Khiafin]

What is the best way to back up a server if it was not cost effective. I need to know the equipment and how it would all be done, a web site would be helpful if anyone knows of any.

Thanks ;)

[Dement]

for a back up depends on the size. Can use a zip drive. Or you can Ghost it and make a whole image of the drive.(Norton Ghost)

[billyboysport]

You can get a tape drive for pretty big sized hard drives, around the 8 GB area. However, you can get a network hard drive, like the Linksys one for a pretty good price and they can hold up to 70 GB. What I do is save on my network drive.

[C.M. Weaver]

You have several options, each having it's own pro's and con's.

ZIP Drive only has 100MB capacity and would require MANY disks to backup an entire server, even compressed. With disks running around $6/per your looking at at least a $60 investment for a full partition backup.

CD-R has 700MB+ (depending on overburning) capacity and can have compressed images (DriveImage or Norton Ghost) spanned across many CD's if needed. With generic CD-R's running about .30/per.....do the math :)

Tape Back-up has huge capacity but the media tends to be really expensive. Even just a Iomega Ditto Max 10GB drive has media cost of $45+ per 7GB (compressed) tape, not to mention that these EIDE internal/external devices tend to be really slow since because of the bus and compression.


For permanent backup the Linksys Gigadrive would not be a good option, besides just the 40GB version runs over $700.

My suggestion would be to create compressed images of each partition you wish to backup using DriveImage or Norton Ghost then burn it to CD. If the image is too big to fit on a single CD just span them across many CD's.....both packages support this.

The bottom line depends on what you are willing to spend to have a backup solution.

[ 02-03-2001: Message edited by: C.M. Weaver ]

[Khiafin]

Price does not really matter. The Linksys gigadrive can serve as a back? Im looking at it on hardware reviews at speedguide. Is it any good?

[C.M. Weaver]

The GigaDrive is actually more than you need if you just want a backup solution. It has a built DCHP and Print Server and some other features typically designed for use in a SOHO (Small Office Home Office) solution.

Just remember that the GigaDrive is a hard drive and is subject to failures like any other hard drive. If you just want external storage w/o the bells in whistles then consider this:
http://www.maxtor.com/products/ExternalStorage/default.htm

C.M.

[youbecha]

If price doesn't matter then get one of those autoloading DAT drives. They use a cartridge that holds 4 regular DAT tapes. I don't know how much data that is, but I guarantee it is more than double all my hard drives put together.

The DAT is fast.

The DAT is expensive.

My Company's servers have these drives in them.