Section 1.1. Champagne Backup on a Beer Budget

1.1. Champagne Backup on a Beer Budget

A good backup and recovery system is essential for a company of any size. Unfortunately, IT doesn't always get the budget it needs, and the backup system almost never gets the money that it needs. Well, if you agree that you need a very good backup system, but you don't have enough money to pull that off, know that this book was written with you in mind. You need champagne backup on a beer budget. Welcome to the club.

Just because you have a small budget doesn't mean you have to do without backup. Most of the backup systems in this book can be implemented in small environments for a few hundred dollarsincluding hardware.

Don't worry, enterprise customersthere's plenty in here for you as well. The more you use the techniques taught in this book, the more money you can save for other IT projects. By the time you're done implementing all the ideas in this book, hopefully my next book will be done, which will be right up your alley. It will cover nothing but commercial data protection solutions, including multiplatform commercial backup and recovery systems, continuous data protection, near continuous data protection, data de-duplication backup systems, replication, and the like.

Now that you've read this far, you may find yourself asking questions like these:

• Why should I read this book?

• Can I really back up with open-source backup software?

• Why should I be using disk?

• Why should I back up at all?

• How do I find a balanced way to back up (wax on/wax off)?

Let's get started answering these questions.