First, I like the idea of taking home a backup every seven days. The more the better. I would have a separate hard drive for that. A smaller one (but not a thumb drive). Don't use one that is for in office stuff.
Second, why more than two? Ok, you are using one. The hard drive crashes. Mine did, it happens. Now, you stare at your one hard drive, knowing your take home (which is for disasters -- floods, fire, someone stealing your server) was done six days ago. You really want a fresh backup. So, again, staring, hoping, praying that the drive you are looking at has a "good" copy of your data. Not corrupt. The hard drive is good. Remember, the single most likely piece of equpment to go is a hard drive. By far. So, now maybe you have a 1 in 100 change that the drive is bad or your data is bad. Not good odds with mission critical data.
So, have one for home. Have at LEAST TWO for the office. Adam and I have five. I actually have seven (don't ask). If you do two, then you have to set it up so that every other day, your backup backs up to each drive, so Monday 1, Tuesday 2, Wednesday 1, Thursday 2, etc. We use five simply because there are five days of the week.
Remember, the reason for using backups is probably 10% hard drive crash and 90% data loss. You know where you suddenly realize that a file is missing from a month ago. My backup is such that I have backups on each of the five drives, four deep. This gives me 1 month of pure data. Then I back up everything on a separate network drive monthly. There are a million ways to do it. Just give yourself a lot of redundancy. External drives are cheap. Don't do a bunch of backups like everyday on one drive.
After two months, I checked my backups. Guess what? I had forgotten to check off the D drive. One month of not backing up my data! So, look at your backups once a week. And, do your offsite backup manually.
Also, do a nightly manual backup of your billing and Amazing Charts folders. I can write you a script. Takes ten seconds. If you use SBS 2003, the native ntBackup is not that good for scheduling or documentation. Get Backup Assist. It is extraordinary good. Extraordinary.
Remember set it and forget it is great. But, if all you do is set it and forget it, then remember this mantra: Set it and forget and live to regret it.
People may not agree and think this is overkill. People may use the grandfather method (which Backup Assist does for you if you wish), but this method is tried and true and guarantees you thtat the chance of your server and all five backup drives go bad at the same time is 1:2,400,578,000.
Human error is much more likely like skipping the D: drives.
Now as to the servers. Why you would need more than one server is beyond me. Get your IT person to write down the reason and put it on here. Makes no sense. If you need an application server, a web server, and a file server, fine. If you are IBM, then go with it. Any large company will use nodes, etc. But, you AREN'T a large company.
As to the Go Live Date, it is exciting. Don't get too stressed. I downloaded AC on Friday and we went live on Monday. Not a testament to me but to Dr. Bertman and his easy product.
Thanks.
