How Do You Handle Buffalos and Offsite Requirements

[treeves]

   

Ok, forum, here's a question: If you are an I.T. provider or have an onsite "computer person", how do you use Buffalo drives to satisfy "off-site" best practice requirements?

 

It used to be companies used tapes to have an offsite backup of server data. How do you use these drives to assure a current local backup and an offsite backup (without subscribing to a remote backup service like Mozy or Carbonite)?

 

Do you swap the drives daily or ?/??

[straightpipe]

   

We started using external hard drives for backups 4-5 years ago, when we were having to swap tapes 10-12 times to make a full backup. 

 

Now adays we are using big Buffalos to hold a full backup and incrementals.  at the end of the week, we take the buffalo offsite and bring another one onsite for the next full backup.  We've now got 5 buffalos.  4 for each week of the month, and one extra for historical backups.

 

If the file server crashes, we're looking at one day loss.  If the building burns we're looking at 1-7 day loss.

 

While this is a useful step software companies like Symantec really look down on using a buffalo for your only source of backup.  They would prefer you use local drives to make your backup, then make a second copy on your buffalos to be taken offsite.