Extension Technology and
Computer Services

University of Missouri-Columbia   Extension Technology and Computer Services—ETCS

September 2002
   Vol. 19, No. 4

A Technology Newsletter for Extension Specialists

County Server Replacement
by John Myers

ETCS has developed a new server configuration that a number of county offices have recently purchased. The new server configuration uses a second disk drive as the backup device instead of a tape drive. This new backup technique is faster and more reliable than the traditional tape backup, and best of all you, don't have to buy new tapes every year.

County servers are great for sharing data within the office. Your data is more secure with the nightly backups. Also, if your hard drive crashes, you won't lose your data and can access it from another computer.

The new server configuration is a Dell GX260 with a 2GHz processor. The computer contains an 80Gb disk drive for the operating system and data backup, and a 20Gb disk drive for user data storage. On the old servers, we either had a 1.5Gb or 3Gb disk drive that contained both the operating system and the user data. Since the operating system is using at least 500Mb of disk space, this only allowed for between 1Gb and 2.5GB of disk space for the user data.

The backup software used is called NovaBACKUP. This software compresses and stores the backups in 550Mb disk files. We have created six backup directories. Five are used for daily backups Monday through Friday and the sixth is used for a monthly backup. For counties that want to fully protect their data, we recommend them to write the monthly disk files to CD for off line storage.

The price for this server replacement is around $1200.00. This price includes the computer, a modem and the backup software minus a monitor. For counties that don't already have a file server, the price will be around $1450.00. These servers come with a 3 year warranty.

© 2005 - Curators of the University of Missouri
DMCA and other copyright information.
All rights reserved.
Contact ETCS