I've never heard of anyone doing a full weekly/monthy/yearly rotation of hard drive backups.


Actually, I'm sort of doing that now for some of the radio station data. (Not the TV station data that started this thread)

You have to understand that none of the data I am backing up is mission critical stuff. We'd grumble and complain if it were lost, but life would go on, and in many (if not most) cases it would be an improvement! These are Employee Folders with work-related files in them, but these files are the precursors to the actual valuable data that is managed and backed up by someone else. In addition to the work files, there are the "other stuff" that the employees clutter up their folders with -- pictures, music, correspondence, etc. We are not the kind of company that insists that company resources be used ONLY for corporate business. Sometimes we have DOOM death matches on the network in which the General Manager participates (and gets his ass kicked!) so all in all it is a good place to work.

The employee folder backups I do are as crude and simple as you could ever imagine: I Xcopy the entire Employee directory to a 330 GB USB hard drive connected to my workstation. Each day I copy the entire thing to a new directory on the USB drive, with a naming structure of BackW1D1, BackW1D2, BackW1D3... all the way up to BackW5D7, at which point it loops back around to BackW1D1 and overwrites it. So I always have a 35-day history of complete employee folder backups. (That is an over-simplification, because, for instance, only four months of the year will there be five Sundays, except once every 28 years (has to do with Leap years) there will be five months with five Sundays.) Let's just say that I always have a month's worth of employee folders saved. The nice part about this crude system is that it runs completely unattended -- I never have to do anything, it just happens. 35 Windows Task Schedules call up 35 different batch files, crude as hell, but it works!

The backups we want to set for the TV station are of a similar nature -- just much larger files (.AVIs for commercial production and programming, that sort of thing, along with employee folders.) Again, useful stuff but not mission critical. What we want is to be able to avoid total disaster in case of a complete server meltdown. As in the radio system, accounting/billing etc. are not on the server in question. This is useful but not critical data that would be good to have a copy of somewhere other than on the server. To that end, I think the solution would be a couple of large external USB hard drives that can be left turned off most of the time, just fired up once a week or so to update the backups, and a couple of times a year reformatted and re-copied from scratch.

tanstaafl.