Something interesting has come to my attention lately...
Connected DataProtector, recently acquired by Iron Mountain. They have an interesting approach that I'm looking into. It's intriguing.
They have an interesting solution for backup of not just servers, but desktops and laptops as well... all over the slow wire.
The cool thing about their storage model is that they discriminate unique instances of any file, and only store one of them across all users. Changes are handled at the disk block level, not the file level.
They advertise that the average max change at the block level for most users is only ever about 2 to 4 MB per user per day. An amount that is trivial to keep backed up over even the slowest of wires.
It's a distinctly interesting option.
That really sounds cool. I wonder if retrieving backups is a pain? At work, we get a lot of requests for "the file the way it was in August" or whatnot, so we have a hundred days of stored backups plus quarterly dump-everythings. But backups are such a pain... I'm on this weekend and of course it's homecoming so I can barely even get there Saturday. Grr.
Hmmmmm....DataProtector....
I think that's what we use at werk....works great.