Storage and Network Upgrade

[Stayana]

Hey I need some help, I own and operate a music distribution and wholesale company, which entails storing a lot of music and documents as well as pograms that are used for the day to day running of the business. As expected my memory is almost full. I have back up drives but those go just as quickly too. What suggestion would you give me? I want something that can act like a server and basically back up all the information and programs to be used for all the computers in the office with user accessibility preferences. I want to make sure that if my office burns down tomorrow I still will have all of my information.

Respond soon, please

 

[iPwn]

Welcome to CF!

What about sites like mozy.com? They offer online backup and storage and you just have to pay for the amount of storage that you use... This would certainly prevent a natural disaster from destroying your local data as it's hosted on the cloud and most likely backed up in several locations on their end as well.

 

[Indigo]

Online backup would be my first choice as well, but it depends on how much data we're talking here, and how fast your internet connection speed is. Offsite backup of really important stuff would work great for this solution.

Otherwise, look into buying yourself a BluRay drive and some dual layer discs, which can afford you permanent storage at 50GB a pop for dual layer (though it's still a bit pricey) otherwise a Tape backup might be in your future if you're really paranoid and want something that's pretty tried & true.

 

[JCB1]

what about an external USB drive?? How many computers do we need to backup??

 

[Remeniz]

How about building a NAS Server/s? You can hook it up to your network, back up files to it and allow access.

 

[Indigo]

NAS backups are just as unreliable since they use external hard drives as well. They're OK for users who don't load them up, but I hesitate to make an endorsement here for a NAS. Unless you buy one that has configurable RAID 1 / RAID 5, then it's just not worth putting faith into a storage medium that is identical to the method used in the main PC.

Windows Home Server systems can be configured to use RAID 1, and then through their replicate processes, you can actually really benefit from the configuration if you're ultra paranoid.

 

[Remeniz]

Build your own NAS server and you'll get the advantage of RAID 1/5. Infact I assumed that you would want RAID. Also NAS software has software RAID.

It can be very reliable if you set it up right.