Do you provide storage and backup solutions for your staff? The ministry that I currently serve does and I think it’s fantastic.
Our IT team provides each employee with one of these Maxtor OneTouch external hard drives and has set up everyone to use Apple’s Time Machine.
Brilliant.
But I can imagine that my most-blessed situation is not the norm, but I don’t know.
So, does your ministry provide a solution like this for their staff? Is this something that you’d find worthwhile?
At the church where I currently server they provide ‘backup’ which consists of a single consumer 2TB networked enclosure. Not the worlds most redundant solution ever.
However I suppose having an additional copy of the information somewhere is better than nowhere at all. Unfortunately there are so many downsides to cheap centralized storage I fear the day the device fails. The idea of localizing the redundant storage to each machine is somewhat intriguing, though how do you keep them from just using it for more storage space?
Great little backup app you might enjoy, check out Synkron. http://synkron.sourceforge.net/ It’s open source, and compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. Works great for scheduled backups, or mirroring drives on a predictable time schedule.
sweet! thanks for that.
At SSCC we have a Time Capsule on our network that most of our staff back up to and some of our presentation computers as well. A few staff have local back up drives. I actually have a 3rd internal disk in my MacPro that I back up to. We are protected from drive failure but not from anything more significant like a fire. I really want to get some sort of off site backup but anything useful to us is not budget friendly right now.
There is always a risk of back up drive/device failure. The gamble is that the back up and the original drives don’t fail at the same time.
That’s the thing I have a hard time with, while the probability of a drive failing is growing lower and lower every day, what happens when one does? The odds of two drives failing at once is even lower however I don’t think I’d ever feel ‘safe’ unless the data was protected by a RAID array in some type of redundant configuration. Services like Mozy appear to be appealing at only $5 for unlimited backup, unfortunately they charge per GB for businesses, which seem to include non-profits in their book.
At home I’ve been running 3 500GB drive backed up to a single 1.5TB drive; hasn’t failed yet but I remain conscious of drive health. S.M.A.R.T stats are awesome tool for watching for signs of a failing drive.
Please don’t rely on a time capsule as your primary, or even secondary, backup. It uses a small laptop drive in a very small, very hot and poorly ventilated enclosure. Not only that, the performance is absolutely abysmal.
yup. definitely a gamble.
Seems like a nice setup. Would it be even better in theory, to use some Time Capsule’s instead of that Maxtor’s? That way it completely automates the process and makes it easier.
I have a Maxtor hd at home that I use to backup my ibook and imac, but i only remember to plug them in about once a month. When my current hd dies I want to get a time capsule. Then i’d truly feel really secure.
time capsule is awesome.
While we’re not necessarily a church, we are ministry, and we do provide backup for everyone. We use local, external hard drives, MozyPro, and Dropbox. The first two provide good full system backups. Dropbox provides great backup of individual files and allows us to share among our Admin team, faculty, and students. Yes, we have all our students use Dropbox to retain their projects in each class. It not only protects them from lost files, but also helps them assemble their final portfolio.
dropbox is awesome.
We offer a personal external HD for each person, network space and back up all crucial data on ‘Jungle Disk’. So we are good to go in case of a complete failure and/or major event that might render our network useless (flood/fire/theft). I will state that the personal time machine backups are left to each individual to manage. IT only manages the network and Jungle Disk.
sweet!
Of-course it’s worth while. Where I was used to work before, I gave each employee a high capacity thumb drive, which they return to me at the of the day. Therefore those little things wont get misplaced causing data theft.
Secondly no one was allowed store data in their own PC, rather everything they do were redirected to the file server upon pressing that “save” button. At night I backed up the server to a external hard drive and lock up the portable device in a safe place.
oh, nic.e
Need to up that to the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy. 3 complete copies: 2 local, 1 remote.
I have not confirmed this, but I once read that once you remove a file from your system, Time Machine removes it from your previous backup files also. If that’s true, it’s not much of a backup solution. (I don’t know if this is true, and I hate spreading disinformation, but it’s better to be aware of any possible limitations.)
Time machine backs up hourly. Keeps as much info as it can as hdd space allows. So… you could lose anywhere from an hour up to a few weeks, depending on when that file was deleted.
http://tinyurl.com/yfnfqfc
When I came on board, the default was to move everyone’s My Docs folder to point to the server, make it available offline and sync on login/logout. The server is backed up once a week and the backup taken offsite. I’m not sure this is the best method, but it works for now.
I found out how to use OSX’s mobile profiles to back up Macs to the server as well, but it’s not infallible.
I’m on the look out for the best solution, but I’m not sure there is one.
gotta get one though.
wow, I wish that we had that here at my work. It is a brilliant idea.
Everyone backing up to a single location is a single point of massive failure.
At my work we copy to a single location, it is manual and I hardly ever do it for the time it takes.
doh!
When I was on staff at out church we did this- they still do actually. It’s great and is definitely a (potential) life saver.
like salvation?
As an addition, we’ve also started using a common dropbox account to backup and share critical organizational documents. Nothing beats good local server and machine backups, but this gives us an added layer of protection for the really important stuff.
Just saw another dropbox comment I missed. Haven’t used Mozy, though. Any comments on Mozy?