need advice on external hd's
hillary-s-bane
baton rouge, la
hey guys, my boss asked me to find a solution to our backup methods. i work at a small engineering firm and we backup cad drawings every 2 weeks or so by burning them to cd. (it sucks! i spend at least a day and a half on it) I was thinking of getting them the WD 250GB (Model WDXF2500JBRNN) external hd. any tips, do's-or-don'ts would be appreciated.
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Just make sure your backup computer sports USB 2.0 or Firewire support! If not, think about getting a PCI USB 2.0 / Firewire card as well.
You can also set up an automatic back-up job in Windows 2000/XP (greatest thing since butter on toast). To impress your boss, set it to backup automatically everynight. :jelly:
Also, make sure you keep that drive adequately cooled!
External drives are good for carrying stuff around, not for keeping perminant backups of what sounds like quite expensive files to lose.
If you want a good sollution that is fast and simple to use get a couple external harddrives have one at work and have one at home. Depending on the data you can back them up in rotation so that you have multiple seperate days worth of backups.
You can use the win2k method to back-up which is easiest. YOu could right a quick little .bat program to just copy files/directories and put them into different days.
Or you could use a linux program called rsync and have it do the same thing. Rysnc though only backs up the differences instead of copying entire files. So if you had a 200mb file and only chaned 1 bit of data only the 1 bit is transfered instead of the whole thing, it makes back ups very fast even over a base 10 connection it's possible.
If this is only going to need to make CDR sized backups then you dont need to spend that kind of cash. A SCSI drive made for a workstation would more than suffice for a small business and allows for future expansion.
I cant say anything for prices in USD but you could get yourself a nice drive and some media anywhere from £200-£500
For a business that is in no way extreme, and having several days worth of backups across a number of tapes is a lot safer than having everything sitting on one portable, ultra stealable drive.
What happens if someone just walks of with it?
A portable HDD would more than do the job though, you could always do a little brown nosing, suggest both weighing up the pros and cons.
Tape - more expensive and potentially harder to use
External HDD - not as secure, everything on one drive
Meh, I'm rambing now! You get the picture
That asside if you have a windows 2k/2k3 server and it's set up propperly you can make a very efficient and secure environment that is easy to maintain and opperate. Also with the advent of things like cygwin you can opperate many linux programs through it also giving you some situations of the best of both worlds. In a case where it seems you are becoming the tech guy remember the golden rule, keep it simple. Especially if monitoring the network isn't your primary function. Both windows and linux can do this. But if you have windows already you'll be a step ahead just to get it running correctly then to take 2 steps back and try and bring linux into the mix.
As good as linux is, it's not always the answer.
well....i told him i'd have to do my homework. i mean i built my own comp and a few others and worked on countless more and i figured what the heck. so now i'll try and look into who we can hire. honestly, i really want nothing to do with the tech work but i don't like telling my boss no.
I know you don't want to dissapoint your boss but at the same time you probably don't want to stress the hell out of your own life getting stuck with two jobs and believe me the tech job is never a side job no matter how many bosses seem to think computers run themselves. Linux is very tricky to set up in a server environment when you know what you are doing. Linux would be next to impossible to set up when you have no ide a what you are doing. Do your homework try it out and fiddle around by all means. But for your own sanity sake don't tell the boss it's something you can do unless you know for sure that you can do it.
I'd say hire someone. But if it's a road you want to take here's the steps you should go under. First you'll need to decide on a linux distrobution, debian and redhat are probably the 2 best when it comes to running a server. I'm also checking out Suse9.1 right now cuz it's pretty slick for a desktop, I'm just not sure what it'd be like as a server.
Anyway try a few different distrobutions and just install them on a computer, try to get them up and running and on the network as a desktop. Then once that's working try and get samba running on them and set them up as a secondary file server and see if you can authenticate to them from one of the windows servers. Next try and use it as the gateway to your internet for one of the windows machines so it's using it for it's internet services. Once that's all running I'm guessing you'll need to have it act as the print server also. Which can be one of the most difficult things to do from my own experience.
Now if you need a mail server on top of that that is an entirely huge project on it's own. Not so much in setting it up, it's kinda easy but you'll need a firewall to go ontop of it and the whole point of this was to kill virus's and spam so you'll need those filters as well.
And on it goes.....
Yeah definitely sounds like you have your work cut out for you.
I can't really help you with the websites beyond setting up the software to run one the actually design requires artistic talent, that you either have or you don't.
For the email though there are some things I'd suggest. I'm going to make a couple assumptions first I'll assume you currently have an win2k or 2k3 server and that secondly you don't have an email server and everyone just receives emails onto their computers via the ISP, no different then if they were at home really.
If that's the case you could hook up the win2k server to act as an inbetween mail server that will pull in all the email for all the local users onto it, filter it for spam, viruses whatever and then pass it out to the users. Likewise you could filter all outgoing user mail through it so if there is 1 machine that is spewing out viruses for example it'll pass through this mail server and get caught, in theory. To do that you'll need 2 pieces of software (well three but one you have). First is everyone on their desktops just uses whatever email program they are currently using outlook/express/whatever. Then on the server you install a program called Mercury e-mail server. The last program is called SpamBayes. SpamBayes acts as a proxy spam filter. You can use it on any email server software but Mercury is free and I've been using it at work for a year so I know this works. SpamBayes looks at every mail and helps classify what is spam or not, if it's spam you flag it then mercury sees the spam flag and deletes the mail (or any other rule you may want to do). Then good messages are stored in mercury's folders until a user checks for his email.
It's a nice solution and would be perfect for your size of office. It's pretty easy to set up, (really good documentation) and again it's free which will be a huge boon to your boss.
The back-up stuff we've alread touched on but just to refresh a couple external harddrives will be your most cost effective and easiest sollution.
New fast computers, that's all about the money.