Backup Solution

[shanenin]

I came up with an idea(not totally original) for a service I could offer small businesses in my town. My market would be small businesses who run everything from a single computer. A lot of these people would be in a lot of trouble if they lost everything: quickbooks, contacts, software specific to their business, business documents.

My idea would be to install a second harddrive and “acronis true image home edition†in my clients computers. I could then do a complete backup to the second harddrive using acronis, then setup a schedule to do incremental backups. If their harddrive failed, I could come right out and replace it, and restore their system back in a few minutes.

I just purchased and started to use aconis on my home system. I noticed every time is does an incremental backup, it creates a new file. My concern is in time these will overfill the second hardrive I installed. Is their an option in acronis that would get around this problem? I noticed there is an option to run a command before doing any backup My thought was I could wirte a python script(command) that would check my disk level and possibly erase some of the files and start with a new full backup. Any suggestions would be appreciated

If my backup disk fails, this will not do my customers any good. Another thought would be to have a script run daily that would check the health and room left on my drive. Then have the script send back info about their drive. If I see a problem I could go do a service call.

I am really just brainstorming here. I would appreciate any suggestions, comments good or bad. Thanks

[naraku9333]

Sounds like a pretty good option for small/home You may consider (maybe give as an additional option) that the backup be on a local server (or NAS) with a raid5 (or better) array. Another option could be a monthly tape backup done by you and kept off site (would require expense on your part for tape drive and cartridges)

EDIT:

The script is a good idea (Im surprised acronis doesn't already have a rotate feature) but, python would require an interpreter installed on the clients systems (probably wouldn't be a huge deal) maybe a batch file or vb script may be a better idea.

Edited May 25, 2006 by naraku9333

[shanenin]

maybe it does have a rotate feature, if so I have not yet found it. vb script might be more practical and a better way to go; I am just biased to python :-)

Edited May 25, 2006 by shanenin