Backup Software for Laptop Users

Hey All, my first post.

I have an interesting situation that i'm trying to wrap my head around for the company i work for. let me give you some background info on what type of setup we are running.

We have about 100 WAN sites that are setup w/ partial T's and 56k Circuits. We have one server location that all of these sites connect through. (we do NOT have ip enabled frame) so any traffic inbetween sites has to come all the way back to our server location and then BACK out to the other site.

We setup External USB Hard drives on 1 machine @ each location. We use PowerQuest Datakeeper software (basically a file monitoring tool makes backup copies if there are changes made) on each machines @ each location to backup to the USB Drive. (datakeeper backups to a Drive letter). This setup works great for Desktops that don't move from site to site. But our laptop users tend to visit other sites and their machines are mapped back to their home site for Datakeeper use. As they change files this causes latency and congestion at the site they are at (especially if they open email and datakeeper trys to backup a large PST file)

Needless to say i am looking for an alternative backup solution for laptop users. I would like something that does NOT depend on the user interaction for it to function.

I'm investigating possibly adding PCMCIA Hard drives to each machine... but that's @ a cost of $170.00 each x 150 laptops... not really the most attractive solution but it would work. And we could make it part of our stock laptop build from now on. This would give us one level of fault tolerance... however if the laptop were stolen the end user would still be S.O.L. I don't see our company buying into this solution.

another more simple solution (read: free) would be to take them off of the current USB Backup setup and just set them to back up on an alternate folder on their machine either using Datakeeper or a batch file w/ Xcopy or robocopy using windows Task Scheduling. This would take the network out of the equation, But this still allows for one point of failure w/ the laptop hard drive dying it's self.

I'm open to any type of backup software package that maybe allows for bandwidth throttling? or alternate file location backup based upon network speed? or perhaps a type of software that can "tell" which segment of the network it is authenticated to?...

I apologize for the length of my post... (especially it being my first)

If anyone could share what they use for Laptop backups it would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

Adam

 

Thanks for the tip. I checked it out i don't know if that will work for us because we have network bandwidth issues. I was looking at http://www.peersoftware.com/peersync.html

This particular piece of software has bandwidth throttling and you can set it to delete "orphaned" files after a specific amount of time. which would enable you to get rid of un-needed backups. It's pretty pricey though @ $170.00 per license... i'd love to have something more in the "less than 100" price range