backup options

Believe it or not, backup options have really increased beyond the
usual. I work for a magazine about data storage and we are constantly
running articles on new options. It's free, if you want to see some of
the latest thinking: www.storagemagazine.com (you'll have to register,
but not to worry, no cost/spam involved).

From talking to many people working on this, both vendors and IT
people, I think you need to sort out a couple of things. You're
definitely, IMO, on solid ground with the need for offsite. As other
posts have noted, your choice is really how often to offsite and in
what manner. Your RAID backup server will give you quick restore.
Assuming that you have somewhere some kind of images of the
applications and configurations for your servers, the next question is
how many minutes, hours, days worth of data can you live without
should your RAID 5 server be destroyed? That's how often you should
generate an offsite copy, it seems to me.

Your options for offsite are not just to take a tape home. There are
an increasing number of service options. There's trusty old Iron
Mountain trucks. But there are also online offsite backup services,
which may actually prove cost-effective for you, depending on the
volume of data you have.

Lastly, it doesn't sound like you have any other office locations, but
a lot of people are looking at new ways to backup over the WAN.

One thing to clarify: do you have both restore and archive needs?
Restore would be to rebuild after a disaster. Archive would be for
long term retention -- rarely used data that's taking up space
otherwise but would need to be occasionally mounted at some future
point (like parts drawings for obsolete products)? If you're truly
archiving, then tape probably is a must (or optical), since the
reliability of data that's never read on disk drives can't be assumed
for many years (those little old bits can flip on you). SDLT is a
solid choice, in any event.

You'll find a lot of articles on the storagemagazine.com site about
this issue, written by people far smarter than me. Check out stuff by
W. Curtis Preston and James Damoulakis, in particular. These guys
really know their stuff and have worked with dozens of companies on
real installations. They don't have aol accounts either :-0.

The only suggestion I have for your boss is to suggest disaster
recovery drills that include scenarios where your current method will
fail. Maybe walking through it will cause the light to go on.