I will shortly be advising my engineer about setting up a backup system at one of the local TV stations. (Clear Channel owns the TV station in addition to the four radio stations where I work.)

The data to be backed up is currently on a striped raid-1 system, but he would feel better if it were also backed up on an independent machine somewhere else in the building.

The catch is... there is about 500--600 GB of data to back up. Most of this data does not change day to day, so an incremental system would work best.

The question is: At the most basic level, should we be looking at a tape system (ick!) or a couple of big hard drives, or ??

Most backup software I have used is overly complex and cumbersome, offering options for every scenario regardless of how unlikely. All we want is to copy the data on a bunch of hard drives over to some storage media. Xcopy does everything we need (even the incremental part with the /d parameter). The only problem with doing it that way is that once a file is copied over, it is on the destination drive forever, even if it is deleted from the source drive because it is no longer wanted. So, once in a while you have to reformat the destination drive and do the full 500 GB backup from scratch.

My inclination is to just set up a terrabyte of hard drive as a destination, and use Task Scheduler to run Xcopy once a day in the wee hours.

Am I overlooking something? Is this too simplistic to work?

tanstaafl.