Disk backup hardware

Hi all,

Can anyone make any recommendations on some type of storage hardware / disk array that my small business could you to write a secondary (offsite) copy to disk, then swap out disks to allow them to be taking offsite to my home (poor mans offsite DR)? I am looking for something that swapping the disks would be fairly easy. I am willing to take recommendations on my a 2 bay rack-mountable tape unit as well.

Thanks

To some degree it depends on how much data you need to back up - but for basic needs it's hard to beat a simple USB 3.0 external hard drive. Plug it in, run your backup, and then disconnect it and carry it off. Far cheaper than an LTO-5 tape drive and with similar performance and speed. And probably less prone to problems than tape cartridges which only have a useful life of around 250 passes.

Your plan seems pretty reasonable and I think external USB jobs would be perfectly serviceable in that role.

I assume that Acronis has a "verification" function that will tell you if the backups are readable and that all the internal checksums match. What I do with my backups is to run that verify function when the drives come back onsite - that gives me confidence that the drives are working properly and I won't get any surprises if I ever need to rely on them to restore data.