Best option for disaster recovery?

[whitenack]

Hello folks,

First time poster. I wasn't exactly sure where to post this, but I decided to post it here since it potentially includes building a new system solely for disaster recovery. I apoligize in advance if this should go somewhere else.

I am the youngest (and by default, most tech savy) partner in a small, independent insurance agency. All of our customer's data is inside a proprietary 3rd party management program housed on our single onsite server. Being in the insurance company, if a tornado or fire came through and destroyed our server, we would have to be back on our feet with all our information restored very quickly. I need help designing our disaster plan.

We currently have a small network composed of 1 server running Windows Server 2003, and 9 or so workstations.

All we are doing currently is backing up all of our server files through Carbonite.

The 3rd party that provides our management program offers an upgrade to the program that adds a few bells and whistles which include cloud computing and disaster recovery. However, the additional cost for this upgrade is $8,000 per year.

I would assume I could design a killer disaster recovery plan for much less than $8,000 per year?

Thanks in advance for your time.

 

[Motopsychojdn]

I'm no expert on professional data solutions but the way I'd approach it is this,

Have the systems at work on their network as you currently have,
but have the server set up on a mirrored raid,
have an external server/storage unit offsite and back up/synchronise to that daily,
and for real paranoic people, backup the backup
This may actually be a better thread to post in networks section but I saw noone had answered even though they had read and didn't want you thinking we weren't helpful mate
*Edit for spellfail
Moto

 

[whitenack]

I'm no expert on professional data solutions but the way I'd approach it is this,

Have the systems at work on their network as you currently have,
but have the server set up on a mirrored raid,
have an external server/storage unit offsite and back up/snychronise to that daily,
and for real paranoic people, backup the backup
This may actually be a better thread to post in networks section but I saw noone had answered even though they had read and didn't want you thinnking we weren't helpful mate
Moto

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I had thought about the offsite clone server but didn't know if there were other options or not. I have a good idea where I could put a 2nd server that would be far enough away to avoid storm damage but close enough to get to easily.