Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[jullrich at sans.org (Johannes B. Ullrich)]

> If someone knows an affordable way to purchase 40 gigs of offsite backup
> storage, and a viable way to pump the bits back and forth in the event you
> actually need to do a recovery, I'd love to hear it.  Thus far I've put my
> money on the tape drives vs. the online services.

The cheap dedicated servers I mentioned earlier will do nicely. I use
rsync over ssh as my 'backup solution'. Nice thing about this is that
its essentially real time (I have the rsync run every 15 minutes).

IMHO, tapes are just too expensive. Overall, I am switched almost
exclusively to backups to disk/CD/DVD. Tapes may be an alternative if
you already put the money down for a big auto-loader. But hard disks,
which now drop below $1/GByte, are very attractive. Just get a barbones
system with a big well ventilated case, and keep adding/swapping IDE
drives. Again, the backup software can be as simple as a shell wrapper
around rsync. If you have Windows systems, you will need to mount their
drives via samba.

> 
> I'll also take a controversial devil's advocate approach to the comments
> posted here thus far:  I do not recommend that you hire a permanent IT guy for
> a small company in this day and age. 

I agree ;-). But I guess its the nature of this list that we like to
have IT guys hired. 

> If you go down the path of hiring an IT guy, he will be put in the position of
> creating busy-work for himself, 

My reasoning is different: In the beginning, you will have a wide range
of IT work: Windows systems, Networking, Linux systems, backups... It 
is hard to find one guy that can do it all well (for a reasonable
price). You are better off hiring a couple of specialists, or maybe put
one contractor in charge and give him the power to subcontract part of
the work (you will recognize a good contractor by the fact that they
will not claim to know it all ;-).


-- 
CTO SANS Internet Storm Center               http://isc.sans.org
phone: (617) 837 2807                          jullrich at sans.org 

contact details: http://johannes.homepc.org/contact.htm
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