We run a business with our offices in Nottingham in the UK. We keep our business critical data on a set of servers in Manchester UK. Although the two locations are not half a world away from one another it would be a considerable time investment to go and physically stand by our servers and do stuff right there.
For the most part this isn't a problem. We have live servers and a back up server for on site backup which are ticking along nicely and are managed remotely. The problem comes in the tricky area of off site back ups. We're currently just taking an emergency back up to an online service but this is obviously quite slow. Ideally, of course, one would do something like tape backups stored with a physical courier service or similar. This is reasonably impractical in our current set up.
The major goal the business would like to achieve is to keep a limited backup set on site (we don't have all the storage space in the world) and keep a larger amount of backups off site, about a week's worth would be fine. Obviously with a tape drive and courier arrangement this would come down to having enough tapes. With an online service the upload times just make this unfeasible.
We are considering new hosting arrangements but until that happens is there anything different we could do to help improve matters or are we at the limits of what we can currently achieve?
