Online Backup Options

Hi Eileen -

You must have spoken to Jackie, who is very knowledgeable about these things.

Online backup is definitely the way to go. If the computer storing the files is a Mac OS X, Windows XP,Vista or 7 machine, then you would be eligible for a home-backup solution instead of a commercial one (required if running Windows Server).

The two online backup systems we have used in the past are:

mozy.com carbonite.com

They cost about the same – $60/year for unlimited backups.

They work well – though 75GB worth of data is a fair amount.

We have encouraged our clients to eliminate the use of their tape drives and use an online backup system instead. Network hard drive backups work well, too – provided that the drives aren’t physically located under the same roof (as you’ve noted yourself).

The online backup options are also very easy to set up – you can do it yourself in a matter of minutes.

Hope you’ve been well -

All the best,

hunter

On Dec 31, 2009, at 4:09 PM, Nancy wrote:

> Hi Hunter, > Happy New Year! Hope you enjoyed the holidays! > > Now that I’m at Farmington River Watershed Association I’ve got a new set of files to back up! So I’m doing a belated follow-up on a call I made to Brainspiral months ago. I talked to one of your staff about what it would take to set up a system for backing up the FRWA files online the same way you set it up for HooRWA. She said it should be no problem and got back to me with a rough price estimate that seemed really reasonable. But there the conversation stopped. I was supposed to follow up by emailing you for more discussion but didn’t get around to it until now. > > Background: At FRWA I have a local hard drive with about 75 GB. The network drive has about 150 GB on it. Our current system is set up to back up on tape but if we backed up the whole shebang every week it would take hours. Our IT guy advises me to back the whole thing up once, and then separate out the active from the inactive files so that we only back up the active files on tape weekly. > > The trouble is, separating active from inactive files is close to impossible when you have hundreds of files and there are five different people accessing different ones all the time. So we haven’t done it and we haven’t gotten into the habit of backing up on tape. At the moment, most of the file redundancy we have is sitting under one roof, which gives me jitters. > > I have asked our itinerant IT person if he would set up an online backup service but for some reason he is not enthusiastic about it. Maybe something is getting missed in translation when we discuss it. > > Anyway, thought I’d at least explore the possibility of backup with Brainspiral, in case we can’t work something out closer to home. > > What do you think? > All the best, > Nancy >