Back-Up

[Paulnulty]

Hi all,
We are a small office of designers. We run 5 iMacs, a mac mini server with a promise pegasus raid array.

We have about 300GB of data that is growing at a rate of about 1gb a week.

We also host our own email (via Kerio).

We don't have a huge amount of money to spend but need some form of back-up. I'm thinking long term about using something like Crashplan or Livedrive but having trialled them it's going to take months to upload the data (we only have a standard ADSL line).

With the above in mind can anyone recommend an inexpensive way of backing up our data?

I was thinking about using a 2TB time capsule and time-machine (assuming time-machine is able to back-up the raid array? Is there a better way of doing this? Someone recommended a drobo but that's far too expensive for us.

Advice would be appreciated.
thanks

 

[TimTheEnchanter]

Hi Paul,

It sounds like you're in the same situation we are, except we have about 3 TB worth on our server. For our creative group, we have 7 iMacs each with a 1TB external for TM. We work with data locally and archive it to our servers when the job is complete. The servers are backed-up by a Drobo Pro and bi-weekly external duplications that are kept offsite.

This is our best plan given our limitations, but not THE best plan. We are still vulnerable of loosing data to onsite disasters or theft, and TM is only able to keep data for a given time depending on how much data is being backed-up and the available space. Our connection sucks, shared T1 so using a cloud service is not feasible for us until we can get a business class cable connection. When we do, I plan on using CrashPlan and seeding the backup.

I use CrashPlan at home and love it. I'm also a semi-pro photographer, freelance artist and music hound, so I have about 1.5 TB on my small Drobo that took about 2 weeks to backup to CrashPlan (on a normal home cable connection). Seeding would have cost me $125, but being cheap and having time, I decided to just plow though the initial backup. I did however stage it by adding the important data first, then adding more after each session. That way you don't have to worry about crashing or loosing connections in a single session and having to start over.

If you were to seed CrashPlan, can your connection handle the daily backup? Worth looking into and the nominal seeding expense to protect your data.

While it would be great to have CP on all of our workstations, I would concentrate on our server most and rely on TM for the workstations, then as budget allows, set-up CP on the workstations.