Data Back-up

I have heard good things about Drobo. It is a small portable multi-drive system that allows you to backup data to it without having to worry about single drive failure. It also allows you to use hard drives that you have laying around (take them out of old computers you don't use anymore), which is a good money saver. And since it is small it is easy to take it off-site with you.

The drawback is that it doesn't come with any automated software to grab data from company machines automatically. However you could share the device over the network and have people manually copy important data to the device.

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Another good way could be to lease space on an off-site storage facility. The benefits here are things like 24/7 availability from anywhere. And it is a managed solution, so you don't have to worry about manually backing up the data and hauling the device to and from the office.

I like mozy.com for small businesses online backup. It is very affordable, intuitive and can backup open files. It has more features than anything else in it's price range. If you are currently using DVD's or thumb drives this is an easy replacement. I have even seen it effectively used with small business servers.

External hard drives are now very inexpensive and support very high data transfer rates as long as your computer supports USB 2.0. This means that data backup occurs much quicker than it would if you were using a tape backup drive or (the extremely slow) DVD writeable drives. I would highly recommend external hard drives against anything else available in the market.

Online, 1 terabyte hard drives can be had for less than $300 now. A new generation of external drives that connect directly to the network (also costing less than $300 for a terabyte) are now available. These drives support a 1 Gigabit per second data transfer rate if connected to a 1 Gigabit network switch. Most network switches sold prior to now have a data transfer rate of only 100 Megabits per second and the backup will be slightly slower when the latter drives are connected to them.

Backup software is now built into Windows Vista versions (except Home Basic). If you are using Windows XP or need more sophisticated and feature-laden software, Norton's backup products are available at a reasonable cost (check online for current prices).