Backup Central

Hi, folks.

Excuse my ignorance, but my IT experience is almost exclusively in the Unix and Mac realm. The answer to my question may be incredibly simple; I just don't know what tools are out there.

I'm helping a retail store which has two XP PCs set up, one as a back-end "server" (just a file share, really) and one as a front-end point-of-sale system. Neither has any external data backup, and they are both about 4-5 years old. To make things more fun, budget is a huge issue.

So, given the age of the PCs, I was thinking a simple solution would be to buy two similar model PCs off eBay and clone each installed PC to the backup PCs. That way, if anything goes bad, they can just swap out the whole computer. Any downtime is a real problem, and with a tight budget this might be the best solution (though I'm open to other suggestions).

I know the eBay replacements won't be any younger than the installed PCs, but the driving concerns are budget and minimal downtime.

If this idea makes any sense, can someone please tell me what tools would get it done? I don't know the particular models of the PCs, but they are Dells, if that matters. And again, they are about 4-5 years old and running XP. Ideally, if one dies, I would like to be able to very quickly swap in a replacement and only risk losing a week of data.

Thanks!

Honestly, for that size environment I really recommend a cloud backup service. It can be as cheap as $5-20/mth and handle both PCs. Companies to look at are mozy, carbonite, crashplan, backupmyinfo, etc.

You might want to take a look at BounceBack http://www.cmsproducts.com/products/backup_software/bounceback/default.html, it will make a clone "bootable" backup of each PC's primary hard drive onto an external HDD. You need to dedicated an external drive for each machine. If you encounter a crash you can do full block by block recovery if need be, or run the PC directly from the external drive. You may also want to supplement this setup with some sort of cloud backup service for critical data files if you will not be taking the backup drive out of the building to mitigate data loss as a result of flood or fire. CMS has a redundant small business server solution http://www.cmsproducts.com/products/backup_software/bounceback/bounceback_server.html which includes BounceBack Server edition which enables you to rotate HDD's off-site. Though, it sounds like budget may prohibit something higher end.