Here's an idea

We decided to change the way we back up our data because the safeguarding of data is the most important element of any business and our old system was out of date.

The total cost of upgrading the system has cost James Butcher Housing Association around £15,000 and has resulted in a more efficient system.

Our procedure had involved backing up three out of our seven servers every night and storing this information.

We had to use eight tapes because we used a storage system in which four tapes could store one week's worth of data and the other four would store a month's worth of information.

This was extremely cumbersome; we were limited in the amount of data we could store and we couldn't back up all the server information, so we decided to set up a new storage system.

We wanted a system that would allow us to store more data and retrieve that information more easily.

After talking to our storage consultants we decided on a linear tape open drive, which means that we can back up all seven of our servers instead of just three, and each server only needs one tape, instead of eight.

The difference in capacity is huge – on the old tapes, each one could only hold 40 gigabytes of data whereas the new tapes can each hold 200 gigabytes.

We also installed a secondary backup system using a storage device attached to the network.

This means we can back up our main file server and email and hold this information off-site so if anything disastrous occurs at our offices – such as a fire – we can restore those files quickly.

Because of these changes, if our computers go down we can restore the information much more quickly and with less fuss.