Blog

You’ve already Identified Your Data and Determined Your Storage Options. What’s next on your road to a solid disaster recovery plan for your company’s data?

Well that would be Step 3: Software options

While manually dragging files to an external drive certainly works, it’s a tedious process and who really wants to take the time to do it weekly or however often you’ve decide you need to for a given machine? So we need to look for software that can do this for us on a regular schedule.

First question would be, what platform(s) are you running – meaning Windows, Mac OS, or Linux? If you’re exclusively using one platform, then you might have a few more options than if you have a mix of systems to backup.

A simple Google search will give anyone a plethora of options for backup software – ranging from free to quite costly. The thing you have to decide is what features are important to you. Some software options include a central server that runs on one of your machines and then deploys client software to all your machines to pull the backups. Other software is stand-alone and you have to manage each machine’s backup individually. In general, if you have only a few machines to worry about, the stand-alone software is going to be the cheaper option. If you have many machines to backup and a central data store to hold those backups, server/client software will be extremely helpful.

Server/Client software
There are many options in both the server/client and stand-alone software solutions, so I’ll just focus on the ones I’ve used and like myself. Symantec makes products that could be considered the “Cadillacs” of backup software. Backup Exec and Netbackup are their best known products, both being outstanding in features and performance – at a price.
Another option I’ve recently tried out is Yosemite Server backup by Baraccudaware. This is a cross-platform solution that can handle a lot of different setups and is quite affordable.

Stand-alone software
There are plenty of options here so again a Google search and knowing what you prefer for features – and what you don’t need for features is going to be helpful. Most all operating systems come with some basic backup program already – for Windows it’s simply called Backup, Mac OS is Time Machine, and Linux distributions range greatly from programs with nice user interfaces to simple scripts that run the tar command to compress your files into one archive. If any of these options work for you, I say use them. If you’re looking for software with a little more horsepower, then it’s time to get your Google on again. Norton from Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft, are all great companies with some solid products.

I can’t really tell you what you’re looking for – sometimes it’s just how the interface is designed that sells you on a particular product. You just have to play with different programs to see what it is that will work the best for you. Most of these companies offer 30-60 day trials of their software. Download some and find out what you like!