Category Archives: Server

Backing up a small business, Help wanted

Does anybody have any thoughts on how to successfully backup a growing small business? We have a total of about 100GB that we currently backup on a daily basis to an external 2.5″HD (very portable). The amount of backup storage we need is increasing at a slow but steady rate, so that we will be exceeding it within a few weeks. When we do, I have to manually archive files on the client computers to reduce the amount of data that gets backed up. This is very time consuming and defeats the purpose of the automated task idea. In addition, there is only one backup set. The data gets overwritten/added on to on a daily basis. FYI, we run Dantz Retrospect to pull the files from 5 clients and one server (all OS X).

So here are the two goals we are trying to achieve:
1) Increased backup security by going to 2 or more sets (Right now there is only one medium, and once that gets overwritten or if it should ever break, there is no other backup layer)
2) Increased storage capacity to allow for future growth (Right now we have to either manually archive or buy a bigger HD each time we exceed our current GB limit)

Any thoughts on the subject are greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tim.

So Far So Good…

As many of you know my company is implemeting Active Directory and MS Exchange over the next month. We decided to contract First Tech Computer in Minneapolis to handle the migration from our NT4 domain to Active Directoy and setup/configure MS Exchange to handle our email and eventually our other collaboration efforts. I must say that I have been VERY happy with how it has gone so far. We are all setup and ready to go with some minor cleaning up to do with respects to our NT4 accounts and email accounts, lists, etc. Scott at First Tech has been amazing in not only the setup and configuration of both AD and Exchange, but with explaining himself along the way and making sure I’m involved with things I need to care about once he’s gone. I am also very happy with how Dantz Retrospect handles the backup of Exchange. We tested it out and it is really slick. I have to start getting in the mind set that everything will now reside on a server instead of our clients POP’ing there mail into the email client. It’s amazing to me that Retrospect can backup an individual mailbox and retrieve an individual message back out of the mailbox. Hopefully our users will not start being careless with respect to there email messages because I can see how this could suck up a lot of IT resources.

As we go along with the setup/migration I will keep you updated because I know a lot of people out there have opinions on Exchange and especially how it plays with the Mac. I too have read all the good and bad that people have to say. I will bring you an objective (as much as I can be) perspective of how it’s going and how it actually goes on D-Day (the weekend of Feb. 25th) when we actually go live.Bill Gates

That is all for now. I wonder which of the newly formed MS Companies handles Exchange. Does anyone know. I know MS broke up into three companies, one that handles the OS, one that handles XBox on peripherals and one that handles Office. Am I wrong on this?

Geek Gather Organization (Fraternity)

My wife mentioned something that made me smile. She said how cool would it be to develop a national organization of geek gatherers (NAGG). She mentioned the idea, I came up with NAGG. Whether it’s stupid or not it sounded interesting. We would be the founding chapter of NAGG and the Twin Cities chapter of NAGG. :) I suppose that takes a lot of time and resources that none of us really have. For now we’ll spread the word about us and see where it goes.

Updating Server with new HDs

So after yesterday’s discussion I am trying to do a little bit of research on where to find affordable but realiable server harddrives. Does anybody have a suggestion? I am probably looking at a pair of 250s or so – size is not as much of an issue as reliablility. And then there is the whole issue of how to make the swap. Can it be as easy as installing the drives, setting up the mirror raid, and copying all the files? Continue reading Updating Server with new HDs