Small Business Backup Solutions?

Maybe its cause I'm secluded here in Appalacia...

My business customers have what I see as a simple need, with never any simple solution. What am I missing?

They need to back up their business data. They are not interested in online 3rd party backups.

For a couple years, I'd been using Maxtor drives, which required a guru to locate email, address books, favorites, etc., but once set up, nicely backed up versions of each file. Of course, they would not reach across the network, so I had to find a free backup software, which process whas annoying, but worked.

This month a Maxtor failed (the USB circuitry, thankfully). Replacing seemed an opportunity, and instead is just a pain.

The reviews say that Maxtor no longer allows backup of anything but My Documents and a few select items. Nice! :-( After due diligence, we ended up with two Seagate FreeAgent Go's, which Bestbuy and some online reviews claimed were backup-friendly.

They're not. They don't seem to back up at all, only synchronize. And they don't save versions, which seems essential.

What am I missing? Doesn't everyone have this problem, and why is the solution so elusive?

Thanks,
Ed

 

I have run into your problem for two of my customers. Here is what I have done. I only run seagate drives, no WD, no Maxstor (I know seagate was bought by maxtor but until I see a problem, its still my brand of choice) For one customer I set up a second internal IDE hard drive strictly for back ups. I went looking for a program that was free and did the trick, I found that at download.com its called syncback and you can set it to back up files and folders it can do a lot of different things including back up after the monitored folder changes, or on a specific day or time using windows scheduler. I had another customer who had a laptop on a dock and I used a seagate external drive and syncback to back up every time it saw the new drive letter, I'm not too sure about that setup as he reported having a problem, but he might have changed the drive configuration.

 

Why not Acronis True Image? They have solutions for small business, but even Home edition will work very well.

 

Thanks!

I have used syncback before, but not with the versioning.

Had never heard of Acronis, but it looks good.

Now, why don't Seagate et. al get that people may want their email addys and databases backed up?!!