I was working with a friend to build a server for email and file sharing for a small business and at work I often get calls from small business owners. Sometimes they are just one hard drive crash away from being totally down for the day.
This brings up a question Ive been thinking about. How much reduncancy should a small business have, and when are you moving to overkill. I realize sometimes small business have very little in the way of budgets. But at least the primary file server should be a mirror set.
What is your experience working with small business’? If they have a file server do you recommend Raid of some sort? Do you recommend they back up to off site tapes, or just a second box. Im curious.
For me, the min I would expect (assuming they have 1 server that does it all) I would RAID 1 the Operating system and Raid 1 the Data files. Im talking IDE Raid. That protects the data, but wont do anything for power supply failures. But you get the idea.