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lflorenceFlag for United States of America

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Best way to backup servers.

I am currently working as an IT manager for an Ag company.  The former IT manager did not do any sort of backup of the servers other than specific folders to an online backup company.  I am wanting to change this, running full backups once a week, with differentials every day after.  I am wanting to know what options are out there.  I am currently looking at tape backup, as well as external hard drives.  I have 5 servers, 1 DC, 1 large App server (over 500 GB used at this moment), a couple of termservers, and a file server.  Backing up to external drives would be cheaper, but I don't know the speed difference between the two options.  Any other suggestions would be welcome.
Along with that, should I just use the standard Windows backup or should I go with a backup agent of some type?  What are the pro's/con's?  Thanks.
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pjam
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Depending on your budget, the sky is the limit.
We use DPM 2007 here, differential back up to disk array every 15 minutes, full backup at nitght and then tape backup on the weekend.  Very little slowing of the network if even noticed (something to consider of course).  Bare metal recovery using their SRT is available.  tte newer version is DPM 2010 and requires a windows 2008 64-bit server.
You can find more here:
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/data-protection-manager.aspx
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What about hardware comparisons?  Is it much slower to run backups to external drives?
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shabrez

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