Are there any websites that show what your backup plans/disaster recovery plans should be?

My boss (who knows nothing about computers and just started overseeing IT because he/she wanted a payraise/more control) is demanding that we have our daily incremental backups taken offsite in addition to our monthly full backups.

We're a destination marketing group so our data isn't regulated like banks or anything and it seems like a huge waste of time and resources to me.

Any suggestions/insights?

12/15/2008 2:24:17 PM

its always a good idea to store backups off site

i guess it depends on how much money took to create the data and how much it would take to recreate (and if it is even possible) as to how often you should backup

12/15/2008 2:39:32 PM

Right, offsite backups are a no brainer. But she wants us to basically do a daily backup offsite instead of the monthly that we have been doing. We only have 3 servers and a very restrictive budget. We have a few SQL databases, but nothing huge.

The investment versus return doesn't make sense to me for such a small office (less than 30 employees).

12/15/2008 2:45:14 PM

i'd doubt the extra cost of having daily backups taken offsite are worth it for your company's case

how much data is backed up daily? do you do the same backup as your monthly one - if not what's different?

12/15/2008 2:46:21 PM

i would look into automating your backups and doing them online (With encryption) so that someone doesn't have to physically take a disk or tape offsite every day. that would make daily offsite backups easier.

disaster recovery is a lot more than just having backups. If your whole office burned to the ground, do you have plans in place to get critical systems back up and running?

12/15/2008 2:55:02 PM

for a small company with no real IT support, the Business Plans at http://mozy.com/ and https://www.backblaze.com/ could work.

12/15/2008 2:56:10 PM

We do a full snapshot of everything with our monthly, the dailies we do are just incremental backups of our network shares and stuff, pretty sure it doesn't monitor the OS for that backup, though the size wouldn't change too much. A full monthly backup is under 1.2 terabytes compressed though.

12/15/2008 2:58:15 PM

I always advocated weekly off-site backups (incremental is fine), along with a monthly full off-site.

You don't need any crazy plan for this. Appoint one employee to take the Friday incremental home with them, and store it at their house, or in a Safe Deposit box.

It's really a simple procedure and pretty cheap (I usually went with tape systems, so we used a 5 + 3 + 1 system, with cycling)

12/15/2008 6:59:08 PM

Not sure you have this option or not, but what I do is do daily backups off-site in regards to the server, but it's just a neighboring building where we have a fiber optic link connected to a NAS.

Won't protect you if there is tornado destroying the entire complex, but probably good enough for any normal disaster. The real off site backups occurs once a week to a data-center.

12/15/2008 8:28:57 PM

Quote :

"i'd doubt the extra cost of having daily backups taken offsite are worth it for your company's case"

Quote :

"she"

that's your problem right there

12/15/2008 8:51:04 PM

tape drive suggestions?

12/15/2008 9:22:32 PM