What is the best way to do a backup in a small office business?

I'm helping my friend, she has an office of about 7 computers, and one server. I would like to know what would be that best way to implement a backup. I was planning on using an external drive, and use something like windows live folder share so that every time a file is updated on the server it will automatically synchronize on the external drive. her database which is the most important is about 10GB, so using a dvd burner probably would not help. Can you please advice me on this issue.

Thanks

What your doing sounds good, but you need to make multiple backups, What she should do is get a tape drive for her server, than she can do a GFS tape back up scheme. Grandfather Father Son backups are basically every day of the week you back up files(Son) Then at the end of each week everything gets backed up(father), then at the end of each month everything else gets backed up(Grandfather). This allows for you to go back to a specific day when everything was working and do a restore if needed, such as if your network get's infected with viruses or your hardware fails. You'll need a tape drive and 12tapes 6 for the days of the week five for the weeks of the month and and one for the end of the month. Just to make sure you get it, you back up every night let's say you start monday, you would do your daily backup's until saturday, then on Sunday you would do a full weekly backup, and this would continue until the end of the month where you would this time do two full backups, only this last backup would be stored in a safe offsite. It would continue this way. Now of course you could use only three tapes and just have one tape save the changes from the previous day each time, but if it becomes infected too all the changes on their are lost. The first method I listed is called Incremental backups which backs up the changes from day to day and only those changes and removes the archive bit on the files, The second method I listed is called Differential backups and backsup everything that has changed but does not remove the archive bit. These are both standard method's in backups. Also the guy above me is right you may need to consider using raid and either getting SATA or SCSI. I would suggest SATA since it requires the least computer knowledge to use, and then use raid one which is Disk Mirroring. Meaning you have and Identical copy of one drive on the other and when one fails you can keep going(depends on the hardware) without failure, but SATA is hot swappable and can allow for little server downtime that way.

Perhaps you might want to try Time Capsule from Apple. If I recall correctly, it is server grade but not server size, and works with multiple PCs for networking, printer sharing, backups (mac) and wireless connections all at the same time. It is available in 500GB and 1TB versions, and is at an affordable price. Here's the link: http://store.apple.com/1800-MY-APPLE/Web...

Please see http://www.lwcomputing.com/tips/static/b...

without specifics, no one can truly answer this - and anyone who tried would be, at least to me, demonstrating their ignorance of IT and backup.

As my page states, there are MANY factors you need to consider.

I use a spare 7 gig 95 laptop running puppy linux for backup.