[PLUG] Suggestions for _really_ small business data backup

[Roderick A. Anderson]

Roderick A. Anderson wrote:

> I have a customer that for years was able to do their backup by creating 
> an CD ISO image (mkisofs) and burn it (cdrecord).  Over the last few 
> months it has been failing off and on for no distinctly discernible reason.
> 

My thanks to all of you for your very excellent suggestions and 
observations.

I should have gone on-site before posting because it turned out to be a 
case of fat fingers on my part.

This is a small office, just three people, with _some_ computer 
knowledge.  The problem was my fix to another issue  missed a leading 
slash for redirection of STDOUT.  A script was failing not the backup.

I have a simple script they run in the morning "goodmorning" that gives 
a non-threating welcome message, mounts the CD, displays the root level 
directories, then ejects the CD.  They put in a new CD and it is ready 
for the next days back up.

The missing slash seems to have caused the mount to fail ... go figure eh?

The backup is done with a script via a cron.

Again thanks to all for the suggestions and ideas.  I still suspect they 
will have to move on something else as their data grows.  And now I know 
others see the same choices I do.


Rod
-- 
> The next test is to replace the CD-RW drive but I've tried the process 
> with an external CD-RW and still get the same kinds of results.
> 
> Tape drives are too expensive and, in my experience, not always reliable 
> without _lots_ of TLC.  In fact I moved them from tape backup in a 
> desktop system, that had never been tested by actually restoring, to the 
> CD-RW and it worked like a charm -- or several years.
> 
> I'm considering SD or thumb/jump drives as they will hold all their 
> foreseeable data needs or even Bakula over the network to an off site 
> system.
> 
> Are there other (_very_) inexpensive backup options?  Well besides hope 
> and prayer.  :-)
> 
> 
> TIA,
> Rod