Here's the time of the month where I come on and ask for your learned opinions.
Company uses a tape to manually back up a different drive on the fileservers, daily, rotating the drive that is backed up.
Company buys DVD writer for various uses, I installed it as an external USB 2.0 device on one of the fileservers (running W2k). No problems. DVD-r works fantastically.
Blank DVD's are 1/4 the cost per GB of tapes. I suggest that possibly we could do incremental daily backups (just writing files that changed that day)with the DVD writer, scheduled automatically - somebody just has to change the DVD. I don't know if they change less than 4.7GB of files per day, but I would bet so. It's worth a shot. Whole network is 300GB over 2 servers, and we don't backup email, etc, just projects.
W2K backup does not support CDr/DVDr for backup. Microsoft's suggestion was to schedule backup as a file, then manually write that file to DVD every day using nero or whatever. I really don't want to do that - seems an extra step in what is supposed to be a simplfying operation.
SO, the QUESTION: what is the best third party backup application to use that will schedule incremental daily backups and supports DVD-R?
SUPPLIMENTAL QUESTION: is there any strong reason not to be using such a scheme that I'm overlooking?
The advantages are multiple: cheaper media, easier to store, backups are now retreivable from any machine with a DVD-ROM, more efficient use of backup (by only doing the daily changes), etc.
Thanks for your help, guys, I learn a lot everytime I read the forum!
Company uses a tape to manually back up a different drive on the fileservers, daily, rotating the drive that is backed up.
Company buys DVD writer for various uses, I installed it as an external USB 2.0 device on one of the fileservers (running W2k). No problems. DVD-r works fantastically.
Blank DVD's are 1/4 the cost per GB of tapes. I suggest that possibly we could do incremental daily backups (just writing files that changed that day)with the DVD writer, scheduled automatically - somebody just has to change the DVD. I don't know if they change less than 4.7GB of files per day, but I would bet so. It's worth a shot. Whole network is 300GB over 2 servers, and we don't backup email, etc, just projects.
W2K backup does not support CDr/DVDr for backup. Microsoft's suggestion was to schedule backup as a file, then manually write that file to DVD every day using nero or whatever. I really don't want to do that - seems an extra step in what is supposed to be a simplfying operation.
SO, the QUESTION: what is the best third party backup application to use that will schedule incremental daily backups and supports DVD-R?
SUPPLIMENTAL QUESTION: is there any strong reason not to be using such a scheme that I'm overlooking?
The advantages are multiple: cheaper media, easier to store, backups are now retreivable from any machine with a DVD-ROM, more efficient use of backup (by only doing the daily changes), etc.
Thanks for your help, guys, I learn a lot everytime I read the forum!