Offsite backup

Offsite backup

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We are looking at setting up an offsite backup and have over 70GB of data on our server (pre paperless project going live). Does anyone have a cost effective solution/supplier as we have found these excessive for the supliers we have tried so far? These solutions are being punted in the trade as being cheap, but this appears only to be so for very small volumes of data, with exponential increases for larger amounts.
Alastair Wood

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By AnonymousUser
17th Mar 2006 14:49

Tape
I would suggest just backing it up to tape every day, and having someone in the office with designated responsibility for taking that home.

Make sure there is always a tape offsite, ie don't bring back the tape the very next day.

Re file sizes, you may find you can signficiantly reduce sizes by changing file formats. JPEG files will be smaller than TIF format, for example - at slightly lower quality.

Cheers

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By User deleted
17th Mar 2006 15:58

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Try this link, it will take you to the site of Dennis Howlett and he has found a company that for c.£60 pa offer 15GB they may also offer greater space at a more reasonable price.

Also you can use the site to ask Dennis his views on this facility, he has some interesting views!

http://www.accmanpro.com/?p=582#comments

Jason
http://www.holdenassociates.co.uk

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By AnonymousUser
17th Mar 2006 16:50

Speed?
To transfer 70GB over a 2Mb line would take about 80 hours. Imho you are better off using tape.

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By dclark
18th Mar 2006 19:51

Not the whole story
Any decent web based backup service is incremental in its nature. That is, subsequent backups only backup any changes and it is the totality of backups that secures all your files. I agree backing up everything in one lump would be impractical for the reasons James identifies.

If you back it up in stages (ie breaking the total down into multiple profiles and starting these profiles over a number of days so after x number of days it is backing up the full 70GB - or rather it has and it is only backing up 1GB a night because that is all that has changed) you will find that very quickly you are backing up your data in very quick time each night. Of course because you have it in multpile profiles, restoring is even quicker

try depositit.com........we use it and many of our custmers use it. I commented before on it, but I would always use it as part of a series of backup procedues (ie periodic tape or removeable hard drive + offline)

Kind Regards

Daniel Clark
Ryba Macaulay Ltd
[email protected]

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By AnonymousUser
20th Mar 2006 11:39

Issues
If the paperless office has a heavy dependence on scanned documents, these won't be particularly compressable. So adding in scope for some form of history, around 100GB of storage might be needed, which will cost about £2.5k per annum.

A proper history of backups is required since virus damage or other corruption could go un-noticed for some time.

I'm just not sure I see any benefit over tape.

And in any case the main issue is not backing up the data, but the restore - it could take the best part of a week to get it back.

Cheers

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John Stokdyk, AccountingWEB head of insight
By John Stokdyk
27th Mar 2006 12:11

Mamut may be worth considering
Sorry I'm late to the party, Alastair. However, Mamut last year launched an online backup service that was free for the first 500Mb and charged 79p per gigabyte per month thereafter. By my estimate, 100Gb would cost just under £1,000 a year.

We also published some links to online storage sites in our guide to web-hosted software. DataLifeline charges £99pa for 3Gb (£2,300-£3,000pa approx for your needs) and Keyone.co.uk starts from £189.

I hope you find a suitable solution - and we look forward to hearing about which route you end up taking.

John Stokdyk
Technology editor
AccountingWEB.co.uk

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By andrewparker1
24th Mar 2006 10:05

Recommendation
We use Depositit. We have used another supplier in the past and Depositit is superior in terms of ease of use and cost.
We shopped around and offsite is more expensive than onsite but the time we save more than makes up for this.

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