Storage/Backup options?

[Fat Tone]

A good friend of mine set up a business last year with ~4-5 employees. Last week I discovered the dire state of their IT. I was going to set him up with Small Business Server months ago, but the guy developing their website/main business tool took them for a ride. Long story short they are now with RackSpace for a Managed Exchange service and web hosting and are truly paying through the nose (£800/month!! ) They are locked in to a 12 month contract with over half still to run.

So now they have 4-5 pcs/laptops and are sharing files by emailing them to each other! I sorted some of their problems but they still need shared storage and a backup solution.

So I'm thinking

a) a NAS box. It would need to allow shares in a workgroup environment and provide a means of removable backup. Anyone have any recommendations?

or

b) a SBS server with tape backup. We'd probably go for that in the longer term anyway, so maybe no harm in doing it now? I'd have to check if Outlook could be configured to talk to the remote 'Managed Exchange' service whilst being in a local domain.

So far they've generated 20GB of data in 6 months. I expect that rate could double.

Any suggestions welcome.

TIA

T.

[schmosef]

I have some experience with the NAS devices from Western Digital and I think they will do what you want.

The software allows you to define shares and set an access password, if necessary.

You can hook up a USB based hard drive to the NAS device to add a removable backup drive.

One thing to note is that the 100Mb version ran far slower than the rated network speed. I would say less than half.

The 1Gb version just came out and I haven't tested it yet.

[Fat Tone]

Cheers, I'll check them out.

I have an Iomega external HDD here that came with software that automatically mirrors whatever folders you want and on any schedule and keeps a configurable number of versions too. That functionality would be great.

[degrub]

infrant makes a nice series of NAS devices, raid 5, with external device connection (usb2)
for backup or u can use another nas. Retrospect 5 license included

[Helevitia]

I own the Infrant ReadyNas NV. Amazing little device. It also comes in rack mountable format.

It allows shares with Windows, *nix and Mac. It doubles as a print server. Runs services and lots more. It has much more. The support is one of the best I've dealt with. Though they just got bought out by Netgear which is probably a bad thing. The software is very stable and I never have problems with it. It just runs and works. I also bought 24/7 uptime, 5 year warranty hard drives so I am good for 5 years on the drives at least.