I recently lost everything off of an old laptop -- yeah, I know, stupid -- I should have backed up, and it got me thinking about what storage facilities use to back up their hard drives. This is especially important considering all of the valuable leasing and legal documentation that might exist there. Sure, you might have paper hard copies, but the electronic copies have to sit somewhere too, right?

Do you have backup servers lined up? Do you have a simpler system where you copy everything to flash drives or upload it to the Internet?

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John Carlisle
Community Manager, Self-Storage Talk
Virgo Publishing LLC
jcarlisle at vpico dot com
312-623-9395

We have a main server, and then we have an external hard drive that the computer backups to every night!

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Never put limits on yourself!

Shannon

We have Storage Commander and run a back up every night to an external drive. We then back up the back up twice a week to MOZY - you can get 2gb free.

Everything else on the computer can be rebuilt in just a matter of hours.

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Wayne
All American Self Storage
Palmdale, CA.


All arguments can be resolved ... with high explosives and Humor!!!

Our software requires us to back up all data every day before we do the close.

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Come to the Dark Side......We Have Cookies

Autodoc probably has the best backup plan from the list of responses. Daily backup should be the bare minimum. Combined with an "off site" backup you can recover from any disaster.

If you were designing a backup plan from scratch…Here are a few things to consider. Hardware failure, Software failure, and loss of the asset.

For hardware failure, mare sure you server computer is running RAID. Basically it is redundant hard drives that you computer sees as one. If your hard drive crashes, the other drives continue to operate uninterrupted.

Software failure could be due to virus or even accidental deletion of files that you need. A daily back up would make recovery of those files very quick and painless.

Loss of assets would be due to theft or fire. With an offsite back up (Autodoc suggested MOSY) this leaves another copy “else ware” that could be recovered if horrible things happen. If you wrap all three of these together, you can have a rock solid recovery plan.

What happened with the laptop? If the drive in it is still decent, then the data can be salvaged for free if you're willing to get your hands dirty. If you want to try to do it, let me know. I'll be happy to help.

Well, my data backup consists of cd copies. No internet backup for me, as too many things can go wrong (well, that's not true. WSS backs up it's stuff.). Personally, the Cds work fine. If it's a system I care about, I RAID the drives. Speaking of which, my wife and I do custom built machines...If anybody is interested.

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Consistency- It's only a virtue if you're not a screwup

Tenant management is SiteLink web, so data is mirrored off-site at the data center. Basic rental data from the kiosk (copies of rental contracts, images) are also on the kiosk's hard drive.

QuickBooks backup files used to get copied to another computer in a different building. Now they go off-site to the backup file space provided by our Internet provider.

Gate user data is on the gate controller, but could be rebuilt on the PC either by pulling it back from the gate controller, or by pushing an update from SiteLink.

Also, most of our PCs have freeware apps that monitor the S.M.A.R.T. data (health indicators) of their hard drives, so if something is starting to look bad, there's usually time to move the data and swap the drive before it starts making thunking noises.

A cheap software program that may help is "Second Copy" you can set it to simple copy/sync/or only replicate changes.

With this software you can replicate copies accross a network or to external drives.