Choosing the backup location

Applies To: Windows SBS 2008

You can back up your data to any external storage drive that supports USB 2.0, IEEE 1394, or eSATA. Drives of this type offer large storage capacities and the speed that is necessary to efficiently back up your data. You should visit the Web site for your external storage drive manufacturer to ensure that your backup drive is supported on computers running Windows Server 2008.

You can use multiple external storage drives for backups, and you can rotate the drives between onsite and offsite storage locations. This can improve your disaster preparedness planning by helping you recover your data if physical damage occurs to the hardware onsite.

When choosing a storage drive for your server backup, consider the following:

• Choose a drive that contains sufficient space to store your data. Your storage drives should contain at least 2.5 times the storage capacity of the data that you want to back up. The drives should also be large enough to accommodate the future growth of your server data. Because server backups are incremental, a backup drive of 300 GB in size or more can hold months of backup data.

• When reusing an external storage drive, make sure that the drive is empty or contains only data that you do not need.