I don't have any experience with the newer cartridge style backup devices.
I have used DAT Tape for seven years. Your budget could easily accomodate a
SCSI DAT tape drive. All you need to do is install Win2000 on a pc to host
the dat drive, and you are done. MS backup utility is not nearly as nice as
Veritas BackupExec, which comes with some Sony Models. Check out these at
www.CDW.com for descriptions. The drives bundled with software are probably
the best bang for the buck.
Sony SDX-400C/TB AIT-1 Drive This is an 8mm drive
Sony PCBacker II 11000i Tape Drive This is a 4mm drive
4mm tape meida is cheaper, the Sony uses '20gig/40gig compressed' tapes but
it supports legacy '4gig/8gig compressed' tapes that are very cheap in bulk.
I have had occasion to restore tapes that have been on shelves for over 2
years and have never had an error. All the dat drives include tape error
detection now, and give us adaquate warning of when to stop re-writing to a
tape.
As for backing up the peers over a network, your choice of software will
have an impact on how you do this. For windows file systems, there really is
not that much to learn or configure. If you intend to backup non-file based
data structures like SQL databases it gets a little tougher.
Tom Turak
-----Original Message-----
From: J. Calvert [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 9:58 AM
This is my first post here.
I have a small peer-to-peer network that I mainly use for DSL. Most of the
computers do not share files and they need to be backed up regularly - about
half of them are equiped with some sort of tape backup. However, the tapes
for these drives are fairly expensive and the drives are increasingly less
reliable. What I would like to do is dedicate one "super" peer computer to
perform all the necessary backups on a schedule and get away from the
variety that I have now. What would be the best way to handle this
situation, knowing that my networking knowledge is minimal?
My main concern is disaster recovery. I'd like to keep my expenses around
$1,500.
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