PCA Forums

I'm encountering more situations where data backup of vital stuff is a problem. In particular, the county clerk's office and a local church are in need of reasonably priced, reliable, and simple backup devices.
I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to recommend. The church had been using a hard drive to hard drive backup (IN THE SAME PC!!) and a virus (Stoned.Empire.Monk.C) infected both drives. I was able to save the data on one, the other had to be low-level formatted. The county clerk's office has recently been upgrading to larger hard drives and their old tape backups are far too small and far too slow to continue to be effective.
Anyone have some good suggestions for a reliable solution? Cost is a definite factor here. 250MB zip drives don't seem adequate, cdr-w are probably a bit too complex and also too small, and most tape drives are far too expensive?????

How about a CD-R Burner? Is 700 Mb enough?

I'm seeing some decent buys on 4-8GB tape drives over on that "other" place. May have to steer them in that direction. Cdr would likely work (if they were selective about what they backup) but the continuing expense of a daily backup would quickly justify a better solution. They need absolute simplicity also.

at my office, which is small, we use a tape backup, mostly because it's simple - change the tape every day, and the most recent tape goes home with the office manager. we're also going to set up a document scanning system which will use a burner for backups - just ordered a 12x scsi plex - tape seems to be the easiewst for the the non-tech savvy because all they have to do is change the cartridge - the other option would be a removable hd only inserted for backup/restore - you can ghost an entire drive pretty quick