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defreyFlag for Australia

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Small Business Backup Solutions

Hi,

We currently use USB and NAS drives for backup for small businesses. Sometimes when clients switch USB backup drives over, the drive letter changes. Also, for NAS drives, backups are too slow across gigabit connections. We are typically backing up VHDs and VHDx - so quite large files. What other media solutions are out there that people are using that are fast and reliable?

Thanks,
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Lee W, MVP
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USB3 - but honestly, it's about as fast as gigabit network in most REAL WORLD situations.  You don't indicate HOW you are backing up.  Backup software for VMs should leverage volume shadow copy so that only "full" backups backup the entire VM, incremental or differentials would only backup changed data and thus be MUCH smaller and FASTER.
You'll need to let us know your actual backup methodology as well as what you need to backup before we can make any proper recommendations. Also please provide the backup software you're using, whether it's the built-in backup feature in Windows or a third party product.
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nobus
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Another solution is configuring RAID10 or RAID5 as second drive on the machine which you backup or put there second HDD and take backups to it. Then you get the highest speed.
I would schedule the full backup when they are in down time and then just do incimental backups daily at 10pm (they should finish before start of the next work day). Depending on the software you have you may not be able to do incrimental in this way but you can always look at new software options like BackupExec (not my favorite just an example). Also what are you backing up specifically? Each and every PC? or do you just have a NAS box? Could you perhaps just have two Nas boxes - Have one that they save all their data to and then once a week do a full backup to the second NAS box and then during the week do incrimental? Do you have an idea of what direction you might go after reading this then I can give you more specific advice I know with the "small business" sometimes money is a bigger issue than performance at least as far as management is concerned it can be hard to convince them to spend any money without showing how it will make them or save them any.
defrey, can younpost a little comment?  did it work satisfactory; and why the B grade, if it did?