I'm helping out a small business with their IT needs and a few questions have been raised over the quality/dependability of their backup system.
Currently they have two servers in use with one DAT72 tape drive for both servers. A total of 14 backup tapes are used; week A (5 tapes), week B (5 tapes), 3 monthly tapes (i.e June/July/August) and one yearly tape. When the tape drive was purchased, the business believed they would be able to achieve a full compression ratio and backup 72GB worth of data onto each tape. However, as with most tape drives, the true compression ratio for this particular drive/business is only 1.2. That said, the total size of the data that is backed up each evening is about 70GB. To compensate for the low storage space on the tape, the business has been splitting backup duties between tape and external disk. As far as data growth, it's mostly in the form of PDF documents that are scanned in. I'd expect 500MB or so yearly of data growth, which would include system state data.
I'm looking for ideas on how best to move to a more stable backup solution. Online backup is an option, but the broadband speed at this location is only DSL 1.5MB/s. The business would like to upgrade their servers from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 in the near future (new hardware). It's possible that a Linux server will be added in the future as well.
Ideas? (14 total) 2.5" SATA drives with enclosures - backup to disk each time?