Looking for small scale backup solution, need advice :)

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whrswoldo

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Jun 6, 2002
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I'm looking for a solution to backup ~250GB of data for a small office. Currently a FULL backup is done every night to one of 2 USB attached hard drive that is rotated every day. I am leaning towards switching this setup for either eSata drives or hot swappable sata drives. Is there any difference between these, or should I use one over the other? I was thinking I could get a couple of these and a couple hard drives, and then have the users switch out the drives and take one home each day like they currently do with the USB enclosures. Any problem with this?

I am also looking into using something like Logmein Backup which supposedly can automate the backup both locally and remotely. Anyone have experience with this?

The office is in the boonies and has slow connection (512kbps upload) which means that a full backup over the net would literally take a month. Instead, I want to make a backup to an external drive, physically transfer said drive to the off site computer and copy the backup file, and then from that point set up the program to do incremental backups. I don't currently know what the size of the "increment" that would need to be uploaded each day is, but aside from that are there any other issues with this that I should know of?

I would greatly appreciate any feedback and I am open to other suggestions that I haven't mentioned.:)
 
Look into sata dock stations, these allow you to hot dock a drive. You could then have multiple drives to have a rotation.

A linux server and rsync would make a nice backup setup too and it's free.
 
I agree with the eSata dock...should be able to pick one up for ~$50. Just make sure you get one with some kind of cooling...the cheaps don't have cooling and drives can really heat up. I have a 2 port dock that works great with my Port multiplier aware unix box...but should work equally as well on Windows.

I'm guessing you'll get 2x or 3x the backup throughput of USB2.
 
Actually should cooling be a concern for an exposed drive? That's something I've been wondering as mine has no fans or anything, but the drive is exposed. It's very cold in my server room (basement. :p) so it's less of an issue for me, but something to consider when I eventually move it somewhere else. I want to run one of those USB extenders through the patch panel and install a drop in my bedroom so I can swap without going downstairs. Yeah I'm lazy. :p

eSata is better then USB mind you, but USB is still decently fast especially for backups given you set it and walk away, not like you sit there waiting for the transfer.
 
i would just go eSATA if you can instead of being capped at below 30mb/ for USB speeds.
 
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