[ale] Low-end tapedrives for SOHO environment

[griffisb at bellsouth.net (griffisb at bellsouth.net)]

> > I didn't want to hijack the Bacula thread, but did want to discuss various Options for tape backups for the small office/home office environment. 

> Anyway, as another poster pointed out, an extra HD or two is probably
> the cheapest solution. Cheap tapes will never keep up with HD
> capacity, so you'll never be able to do a complete system backup on
> tape, barring some fundamental technology innovation.
> 

Okay - I think I'm sold on the disk drive. Would you make a Samba Server to back all the Win PC's up to, then use the external drive to backup the Samba Server - or would you completely skip the server, and just walk from PC to PC? If you walk PC to PC, would you make a separate partition for each PC? Or just one big partition.

I'm leaning towards a Samba Server, then just back that one up. Less walking around. But, I (or my son) would have to touch each PC anyway. The idea is to run a scandisk, delete old files, run windows update, update and run the anti-vir, then back the PC up. Once a month defrags would be done. Hmmmm, VNC on each desktop would certainly help ease that pain.

Sorry to talk about brandX operating system, but that is what is on the desktops. If I were to introduce Linux, it would be in the form of a file server / backup server.