Hi, can you suggest what would be the best backup solution for small schools (roughly 150 students, 30 teachers). What i'm also interested is the local backup vs cloud backup. Price is a factor here.
For cloud backup i was looking at Carbonite Buiness (or Buinsess premier) that gives 250Gb-s (or 500GB) of storage. As I understand, one of the advantages of cloud is that the data is stored off-site, it has version history and they have backups of backups (so to speak) plus i can install/configure the software and leave it be (with cloud option, I plan to back up only teachers computers, since i told student's not to keep anything important in school pc). Also they charge $230/year (or $600/year). I also checked out Mozy, but it seemed to be a lot more expensive.
I don't know much about local backups, but i heard that Tapes are obsolete and people suggest drive backups instead. I looked around in Spiceworks forums and saw people mentioning NAS. I get the general idea what it is, but i'm not sure how you'd calculate the storage space required (to include version history if possible). I'm also not sure how important off-site backup is when you have local backup installed (that makes 2 servers plus all the required software?). Also what software/licences are needed for local backup (windows version?).
Since it's a small school, we don't need some expensive high-tech backup system, but something cheap (and easy to use) that would get the job done would be nice (all of our PCs are Windows, except one linux server).
PS: Our ISP is installing fiber in spring so we should get faster internet connection as well (don't know the specific nr-s yet). Currently we have 8M/512k connection.
Anyway, what are your thoughts on the matter?