backup strategy for design house

[cobasa]

ours, is a small multimedia design house working with video only sometimes -- mostly web design and no print at all. we currently have three production machines, three servers and about six laptops on a lan getting backed up to vxa-1 tapes using Retrospect 6 on a mac agp graphics, os x 10.3. i have the file servers and production machines in one group getting backed up five days a week. the laptops are in another group getting backed up on the other two. these backups are on the same backup set and are scheduled after work hours.

 

we want to add another backup -- this one, a weekly recycle or destructive backup of each computer so if a machine has problems, we could immediately format the computer, reinstall the system, and applications, then restore all email and other needed files.

 

questions:

if everyone stores their needed files in My Documents (Win) or in their user folder (Mac), then am I correct in assuming that I just need to use the "Documents Folder" Selector to have everything we need?

 

we want to speed up the backup and restore process for the recycle backup. we've considered a swappable hard drive array or raid consisting of two drives that we could swap out with a third drive to take offsite. is this a good option and does anyone have a suggestion for brand, interface, etc., on such a media system? we're looking at these two. http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg37_firewireidehotswapbackup.htm and http://www.wiebetech.com/products/traydockextreme.php based on a macworld article we found.

 

any insight is appreciated, thanks.

[natew]

Hi

 

The safest bet is to back up the OSX "users" folder from each machine. You can create a custom selector to do this.

 

Hard disk backup is good but it is not as reliable as tape. If you planning to use hard disk it is a good idea to have two disks and rotate between them.

 

Thanks

Nate