[Discuss] Backup options

[Peter Scott]

I have beat my head against the problem of backup for some time, so 
maybe some here have ideas.  I have 4 machines on the LAN here that I 
want to back up.  For the past seveal years I kept bumping up against 
the limitations of tape drives and kept upgrading my Travan.

Now I have reached the point where one machine is too big for a single 
20GB tape.    I've considered the option of backup to hard disk already 
and it may come to that, but since I already have RAID-1 on each 
machine the purpose of a backup is really not crash recovery but 
restoring lost data and/or disaster recovery, in which case it makes 
more sense for it to be able to leave the building.  I may not have 
practised that with the tapes yet, but at least I could.

I know of at least one local company that does remote data backup via 
the net but I never received a quote from them because, I suspect, I 
would have been too small a job for them and it wasn't their core 
business.  It's an attractive option for me if it costs under $300/year 
(about what I was spending on tapes and drives).  I'd be storing 0.1 - 
0.8 TB total with around 20 GB/week in changes.  I would have to come 
up with a way of encrypting the content and integrating with rsync but 
I'm sure that's doable.

Does anyone know of an option for (a) network data backup (a local 
company 'cos I want to meet who's handling my data) and/or (b) 
removable media capable of holding at least 40GB uncompressed, either 
of them under around $300/year?  When I looked at options for tapes 
they seem to cost a helluva lot.  And I'm not going to sit around 
feeding DVD after DVD to a hungry drive.  Yeah, I know incrementals are 
smaller but I still don't want to be tied to the desk for the fulls.
-- 
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
http://www.perldebugged.com/
http://www.perlmedic.com/