Backing up Office Files Offsite

Backups are often thought of way too late. I see it everyday, and I am even guilty of it many times. I'll often store important documents that I have only one copy of on my laptop. BAD IDEA! Why? Well because the hard drive in my laptop costs about $29.95 on eBay, and can die at any given moment. Dying with it would be my only copies of important documents.

So what do I do? I'll tell you what I would do. First I would get a Snapserver 410 made by Adaptec. They're reasonably priced for the performance they provide. The 410 will give you 1 TB of NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage capacity. As long as you are only backing up critical files this should give any small business a good start towards a comprehensive backup strategy. You'll also have to have an Ethernet office network in place to allow all computers to connect to the snapserver.

Then add the snapserver to your network. It's pretty straight forward. Once you have the snap in place and operational you need to start backing up data to it. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is to create a share on the snap and save all important folders and files to it. Then if you need to recover them, simply copy them from the snap back to your computer.

You could also automate the process by writing a simple batch file that just copies important files from your machines in the office to the snap. Then create scheduled tasks that execute the batch file on the machines that need to be backed up nightly. Viola! A simple, cheap, and powerful backup strategy for your average small office. The Snapserver uses RAID technology to ensure data protection. There are four hard drives and depending on how you configure the box, you can lose a couple drives and still have all of your data.

If you have several terabytes of critical data I would look at another type of solution, like a SAN. This would be for larger offices or small companies working with huge amounts of data. But it provides a lot of redundancy and the most up time.

If you want to take the first step above and really be smart, you could just get another snapserver, and configure it exactly as the first one. And maybe weekly switch the second one with the first one. When you pull the first one out of service take it off site, the whole box.

Then should the office burn to the ground, be swept away in a flood, or blown to bits by tornado, your mission critical data is recovered by plugging in the second snapserver you took off site. It may not be a complete set of data, but it will be much better than losing EVERYTHING. And it will be complete up until the time you took it off site. So the more often you take it off site, the more complete the data will be.

Don't think about your backup and disaster recovery strategies after something happens and you lose critical data. It will be way too late then.