So I walked into a medium sized business (90 regular domain users, ~20 interns) that had been... Neglected, not due to lack of caring, but due to lack of Knowlege and time by the former system admin (who was actually a business office manager that "knew computer stuff") I inquired about our backup solution, and was lead to a dusty Maxtor external HDD that wasn't plugged in, and made all those fun noises hdd's make when they're past their prime.
I will mark information I'm not 100% sure of the viability of with **
A bit more about my environment:
We have 2 physical locations, with all the servers located at the primary location. we have a 2x2mb point to point connection that is responsible for our phone system, and all file access on our domain. As you can imagine opening a word document takes several seconds, let alone doing something like transferring photos from one of our events. At the primary location we have 4 physical servers, 1 handles a proprietary program that we access using remote desktop. 1 is our DC/file server, 1 is our retired DC that was new in ~2004, and the last one is our exchange server. We are migrating from exchange to google apps this summer, and will be moving from our current server based program, to a cloud based program. This essentially means that we will have 2 boxes that are somewhat new, less than 3y/o, that won't have a purpose.
My plan now is as follows.
Take the former exchange server and promote it to act as a secondary domain controller. Move this server to our 2nd physical location. **Find some way to mirror the files on both servers so that changes on one are reflected on the other, essentially creating an offsite live backup**
**Use the former application server as a glorified NAS device, and have it keep a nightly backup of the files on the DC that is inaccessible to user access.**
Finally I would like to add a cold weekly backup. I'm open to suggestions on the best way to do this (my current SHTF backup is a 2tb external hdd that I bought, plus using sync toy to copy all user file changes from the New DC to the old 2004 DC)
I'm hoping for software suggestions, and possibly hardware suggestions, as I've never had the chance to build a backup solution from scratch before.