Backups on a Budget
One of my favorite tools when working at my last job (besides vbscript and cmd batch) was robocopy. It’s included in the Windows Server Resource Kit. We used it for all sorts of things, from getting a difference log between two directories to mirroring one computers files to another.
Although my last job wasn’t dirt poor and in need of a budget backup method, I’ve seen a few companies working at my present job that worked hard to do more with less. One of the innovative ideas that I saw was the use of an external USB drive for backups. They use Windows Backup to perform a complete system backup to a file located on the USB drive. There are several potential problems with this method which I won’t go in to… but one of the ideas that occured to me while reviewing their set up that I do want to propose is…
If you have a file server (and I have an older USB drive stocked full of various media I’ve collected over the years, from technical information to source code I’ve written, to backups of my website) you can get a mirror image of your file server data by using robocopy to mirror the data on your file server to the USB drive.
You could easily rotate USB drives for off-site redundancy, and with 1 TB USB drives being in the 500$ range, you could get 2 years (roughly) worth of life out of the USB drive performing backups for multiple systems (robocopy works over the network, and you could perform net use commands in a cmd batch file to create mapped drives and remove them for the purposes of backups.) Assuming the average computer is 80-150 GB of data (let us 150 GB for the purposes of math), you could store 6 fully loaded computers on your USB drive. If it’s 80 GB per computer, you could store 12 fully loaded computers. If you average less than 30 GB per computer, you could store 33 computers on your 1 TB USB drive.
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