Upgrading home/small business computers

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macdonaldnz

6 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1986434 31-Mar-2018 16:55

Most of the data is Excel & Word documents, and also personal pictures and videos.

Our accounting information is all on the cloud so already backed up, and our payroll system gets backed up fortnightly to a flash drive.

I do have a external hard-drive I currently back one computer up to, I think I use Windows back-up for it.
I have used Command prompts from time to time but I'm not overly familiar with them.

JimmyH

2886 posts

Uber Geek

#1986468 31-Mar-2018 18:05

If its for business use then you need to think about what would happen if the files aren't accessible. Either short-term or long-term. And then plan accordingly.

You don't say how much storage your files take, but from your description I'm assuming it's not huge (say less than 3TB). It also sounds like you have only two users, so you don't need a massive hardware spec for many people trying to access stuff at the same time.

So my thoughts are:

get a NAS. Either 2-Bay in Raid5, or a 4-Bay in RAID6 if you need more storage. That will give you a centrally accessible storage pool, with some fault tolerance if a drive fails. However, this does not count as having a backup! While it means you won't lose anything and can keep working if a drive fails, it won't help you if ransomware, a lightning strike, a burglary or a fire etc take out the NAS. You need a backup. If the business is your livelihood then you need two, or better three.

I would:

Preferrably use a backup solution that has versioning and keeps old versions of files. The IRD, for instance, won't be very understanding if you can't do your tax return because you accidentally over-wrote a key spreadsheet.
Back up the NAS nightly to an external hard drive. Have at least two of them which you rotate. Always keep one of them off site. A full backup weekly and an incremental one nightly would be about the minimum. You can automate that.
Also backup the NAS to the cloud. A good cloud backup service doesn't cost that much, certainly compared to the cost and inconvenience of losing your business files and records.
When files are done (say the tax records for a particular year) and won't change, burn two copies to a medium such as an optical disc for permanence. Store these in different places.

1101

3122 posts

Uber Geek

#1987533 3-Apr-2018 11:32

macdonaldnz:

and our payroll system gets backed up fortnightly to a flash drive.

dont rely on Flash drives for backups. Just not reliable enough for backups (but better than nothing)
At the very least, get 2 or 3 of them & alternate between them (or backup twice to 2 flash drives)

networkn

Networkn
32351 posts

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#1987536 3-Apr-2018 11:39

Rule of thumb with backups, backup at least as frequently as your data changes significantly, or at the period at which you can't cope with the loss of data.

Ie: If you have significant data change daily, at least daily. Alternatively, if the loss of 2 days data would be massively inconvenient or expensive then backup more frequently than that. Daily is my recommendation. Also consider archiving as well as backup. We have seen some sad stories where people do one backup a week or day and keep 1-2 backups, but find the data was corrupted a week ago but they didn't notice and there is no chance of recovery.

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