SBS2008 Backup Devices

That is mainly what we look after - 5 to 20 users.

I havent used 2008 very much however just yet.

We mainly use storagecraft to do our backups.

For our customers we have an onsite NAS, then have 2 rotating offsite HDD.

I would recommend probably something like a Qnap-219P as these are well featured and offer good performance. They have additional features as well which may be of some use to your businesses.

They also have an autosync option - plug in offsite HDD and it replicates from NAS to USB HDD.

Main benefit of this is that it is the NAS that is working, not your server or network.

Its a bit more expensive than just using external HDD but I think its worth the extra bit.

I think it is also important to discuss how much data the customer is happy to lose. Once they start thinking about this, they get a little more flexiable on the price.

One of my concerns is what if the server room burns down - IE make sure that you never have everything in the server room at the same time. So if you are going to use 2 drives, then I would rotate them on a daily/weekly basis and get 2 the same. This works okay for some of our smaller <5 user customers.

As mentioned above we often use the smaller 2.5" HDD for offsite backups, but just depends on the customer and what they want.

Just thought I would let you know some real-world experience.

In XP/SBS03 environment I have found that performance on Qnap-219P is around the 30-35MB down and about 25MB up. These arent fantastic but they are pretty good for the device.

Just pulling a massive backup down after system crash to put into VM on new Vista64bit setup - sustained 55MB/sec down!

Will take about 1hr 10 minutes to pull down 230GB backup files.

I am not really sure exactly why there is so much of an improvement but it goes to show just what you can do with the Qnap-219P. (The Vista 64bit setup is basically a server config so this maybe why).

This performance is also without jumbo frames enabled which I would assume would increase it some more.

One thing that I do think needs to be of some consideration is how much data is getting backed up and ensure that it can happen within the time frames.

Also if you are going just USB there are likely to be significant performance decrease if backing up multiple computers to the one USB drive.

We have always done a full backup including Exchange, SharePoint, SQL every night 100%.

Using tape we rotate tapes and have off site storage.

We wouldn't want to move away from that concept of 100% backups and ability to have a copy off site.

I don't think I saw QNAP on the Windows 2008 HCL ?