OK -- time to confess -- we weren't backing up the estatic development server often enough. It's something I've lost sleep over, as I've dimly thought about the effects of not having our development server backed up appropriately. I had spent many hours considering a backup solution, and today decided to do something before it was "too late". Some of the options that we had mulled over included tape or DVD backup, using an external hard drive or a NAS device (like the Buffalo Terastation Pro), an online server that mirrors data from the existing server 1 for 1 via fibre obtics, and a remote backup solution.
After some deliberation, the right answer for us seemed to be a remote backup solution. A tape or DVD backup requires too much manual intervention -- someone has to rotate the tapes or DVDs routinely then take the discs off site. The cost of a "robotic" solution to that problem is just too expensive for us. An external hard drive has a similar limitation in that it doesn't exist off site. If a hurricane were to come (which is very likely) there's a good chance that the external drive would be damaged as well. A single drive also doesn't provide any redundancy in case of failure. The NAS solution doesn't have the redundency problem, but it does have the same geographical location limitation. An online server that mirrors our data in real time provides the best recoverability in a disaster, but is also the most expensive to maintain, and has the same limitation regarding geography.
Because bandwidth is cheap, a remote backup solution proved to be an effective means to solving our backup problem. This solution provides a backup off-site, routinely, and with little maintenance. There are many remote backup providers online, all of which have different offerings at various price levels. We went with ByteFortress.Net for 2 reasons. The first was price -- this solution is extremely affordable ($300 a year for 100 GB of storage at a single off-site location). The second was their remote backup agents. The software they provide has built in agents for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory state, Oracle databases, MySQL databases as well as file-shares from multiple O/Ses. This solution is ideal as we now have a single backup solution in place for our production email and web/database servers, as well as our development server for a single price. There's no hardware to install, and if we were to move our server's to an alternative hosting facility, the backups come with us. In addition, I spent about 20 minutes with an online sales rep before purchasing this service. The sales rep was knowledgable about the product offering and the technology behind it -- not to mention helpful.
ByteFortress also offers many extensions to their service offering -- including multiple geographical redundancy for data storage, a backup client that can be installed on Windows XP workstations, and more.