[jstarz927]

I've been asked to back up some archives of a small business and I was wondering what option would be the most secure? We would not have to modify these files, merely look at them from time to time, so I was thinking about burning several copies of the files to CD, but are there other options that are safer?

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I'm not entirerly certain what you are asking....

They should be backing up already on a regular schedule, if not daily, at least weekly. Rule of thumb, back up as often as you need to so that if something goes wrong, you don't mind recreating it.

Shoot, I know people who back up hourly.

Do you mean offsite? What kind of business? What kind of volume? This is such a vague question it gives me the willies.

[gerryf]

I'm not entirerly certain what you are asking....

They should be backing up already on a regular schedule, if not daily, at least weekly. Rule of thumb, back up as often as you need to so that if something goes wrong, you don't mind recreating it.

Shoot, I know people who back up hourly.

Do you mean offsite? What kind of business? What kind of volume? This is such a vague question it gives me the willies.

[jstarz927]

Well, by small business, I mean seriously small...like six people, and they haven't been backing up. Basically they have a bunch of old files (MSWord, pictures, Excel spreadsheets, etc.) that they want off their computers. I think all in all, the files take up about 400-700MB.

[gerryf]

Well, yes, you could take in a cdburner and burn them all to the cd, likely even isolating each PCs contents to a different folder.

Burn three cds, tell them to keep one, handy, give the other to the owner to take it home and put the other in a different offsite location.

The bigger issue you ought to address is making sure they backup more regularly. Are these networked? Set up a share, have everyone share data to the share, have the person who sits at the pc hosting the shrae do a weekly backup (atleast).

I'm still a little fuzzy on this whole thing...I suspect when you get onsite, things will be a little clearer, but I just have to wonder why they don't just move burn a cd for such a limited need (the archival process).

Again, the bigger issue is REGULAR backups. If you are their PC tech, stress the importance of this, because somewhere down the road, they are going to come to you with a PC crash and get very upset when you cannot recover the data due to a total catastrophy