If you’re looking at streaming data off-site, you may want to look at ADSL 2+ or ADSL Max Premium….800k upload (or something like that) – but you pay for it!

For local P2P disk-disk backup, I’ve heard that Retrospect is a good piece of software…or there is the old xCopy scripts…

I definitely want to stay away from tape drives – always hated the damned things!!! I can back upto DVD if I want to.

You make a good point about the offsite/on-line solutions, but some of the lag I’ve seen has been appalling – everyone raves about their download speeds, but their upload is typically seriously limited at 256k or 512k!

I saw something the other day, P2P backups, but I’m not sure I’d want the rubbish off your Hard Disc filling up my machine!!

I like Mapquest’s post about tape-backup, because you can take it off-site, but tape is still tape (all our customer servers are RAID5 and run tape backup systems) but for large amounds of data (of 100’s of GB) the LTO range of drives LTO-3 (&4) which will now do 800GB-1.6TB compressed (never achievable, so stick to x1.2 of the native, say 500GB-1TB). Backup in 100’s of GB of data onto tape will take hours (and hours), so moving towards external removeable HDD is coming in for speed. (n.b, an HP Ultrium-3 drive + scsi / sata HBA card + tapes will set you back about £1k + backup software, a 500GB disk will cost you about £70).

As for your commend about external on-line backup sites, I’ve seen these, and beleive me, the infrastructure is amazing. Due to EU regulations, you won’t have to worry about security side of things (too much). There are several on-line sites, the business ones will typically charge £4-8 per GB (compressed).

Darren

I’d almost come to that decision, was just bordering on a last idea of a USB hard drive enclosure and then I could put any size drive I liked in it…. But found a nice USB HDD, 750GB for just over £100.

Keiron