Any ideas of decent companies that do backup for small companies?"

August 31, 2005 12:33 PM

Small Los Angeles company (14 computers, 1 terabyte of info) needs a reliable and reasonably-priced off-site backup solution. Any ideas?
posted by tsarfan to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Backup to tape, walk over to a bank vault.
posted by MrMulan at 12:49 PM on August 31, 2005

I don't think you could walk 1tb on tape.

Depending on how you have the 1tb stored, you could see about making a reciprocal agreement with another company to simply keep a mirror of your files. You'd have to pay for the duplicate storage, and for powering their storage, but it may be cheaper overall. Of course, which company you chose would count for a lot...
posted by devilsbrigade at 1:04 PM on August 31, 2005

What kind of bandwidth would be required? Is this just 1 terabyte of information that you've accumulated over several years, or do you expect to create several 100 GB's of information each, say, month?
posted by odinsdream at 1:08 PM on August 31, 2005

I don't think you could walk 1tb on tape.

Why not? Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
posted by blue mustard at 1:47 PM on August 31, 2005

devilsbrigade:
Make one complete backup on 5 tapes, then make differential backups
posted by MrMulan at 1:48 PM on August 31, 2005

spanned across 7 tapes (DLT IV) you could fit 1 tb.
you'd still need to physically take them offsite though.

all robotic tape libraries support slot partitions, where you use multiple tapes as one big continuos volume.
posted by phredhead at 1:49 PM on August 31, 2005

Getting another company involved is not cost effective for a small shop. I got quotes from Iron Mountain and some other company for about $350/month.
posted by MrMulan at 1:49 PM on August 31, 2005

What phredhead said.

But those autoloaders cost a pretty penny, as does good backup software(Veritas/ArcServe)
posted by MrMulan at 1:51 PM on August 31, 2005

I use Strongspace for my personal stuff ($8/month, 4Gb) but their plans get expensive when you're dealing with significant quantities of data. For this much, you're probably better off buying a server, stuffing it full of RAID drives and leaving it in a co-lo somewhere.
posted by blag at 2:50 PM on August 31, 2005

Depends on what you mean by backup.

Iron Mountain and Sungard are two of the major players in this field. I've worked with both without any significant issues. Doing it yourself is always an option, but I think that people lowball the actual cost of handling this in-house, usually by neglecting to figure in any staffing costs.

Personally, I use Connected.Com, which is now a division of Iron Mountain.
posted by mosch at 8:42 PM on August 31, 2005

I agree with Mr. Mulan. I work at a relatively small company, and this is what we do. (Well, I think we mail them to the bank, but yeah)
posted by Rictic at 10:53 PM on August 31, 2005