Offsite Replication and Cold Servers

[lameid]

I'm trying to come up with a Disaster Recovery Plan to make a site with cold servers but rapid inexpensive recovery. What I am thinking about is keep a workstation at the backup site with one of those USB 2.0 external drives with files replicated or backed up to it. I could then plug the drive in to a cold server and then be up rather quickly. I am of course trying to do this as inexpensively as possible, hence cold servers.

I have an older firewall appliance that I can use to setup a VPN at the backup site and completely deny all traffic except from the live site. Unless throughput becomes a serious issue, I should be able to use the connection at the backup site which is owned by one of the owners of the company I work for.

All that said, any recommendations alternatives or other suggestions are welcome and sought after.

 

[asmith1972]

You could look at Data Replicator at

http://www.purenetworking.net

for a inexpensive way to mirror or replicated your data to another disk or device

 

[lameid]

Thanks for the tip. It looks like a powerful, flexible and inexpensive tool.

Do you have experience with it? Any caveats I should be aware of?

It looks like it will do the job for files and SQL backup files. I missed mentioning I also need to backup an Exchange Server. Any additional thoughts?