Be Excellent To Each Other

At the moment here at work we have a pretty basic backup setup (not including the Time Machine style backups on each individual machine)

A 4TB drive on the network (connected to a server PC which isn't really used for anything any more other than serving files from that drive) that is synchronised to another 4TB drive daily (the second drive is taken offsite and brought back in, bit laborious and obviously prone to human error)

The 4TB drive is rapidly approaching full, so we need to expand - but there must be a better way.

Current thoughts:

- Some sort of NAS, with RAID1 storage for redundancy I guess - but this doesn't solve the problem of us wanting an offsite backup unless we take some of the drives out in the same way we do at the moment.

- Some sort of NAS, backed up to Cloud Storage (Google Cloud Platform etc) which solves the offsite backup problem, but is seemingly quite costly (8TB would be approx £1K a year)

How do you guys all do it?

We don't really. Code in bitbucket, servers in AWS, mail and office stuff in google docs.

The only reason anyone time machines their laptop, is to make config setup easier on a new machine.

How much would total data loss cost you?

"How do we do it" would be a profoundly non-useful answer here, but I don't really think a grand a year is excessive for off-site backup.

What is that 4TB of data made up of?

For a small company you probably don't want to spend money on your own in-house backup solutions as it's not particularly scalable as the company grows (or sadly contracts) and it means hosting stuff in multiple locations for redundancy.

You're best off using a BaaS provider. Seems expensive but you only use what you need and won't have capacity issues or too much kit sat around doing nothing. Also what Grim… said.

The vast majority of that data is made up of archived jobs that we only keep for reference and in case a client asks for artwork etc. - personally I think we don't need to retain absolutely everything, but there you go.

I agree with your point though.

I let infrastructure people to sort it out.
Simple.

Ones and zeroes.