Hi, Al-

>Is there any backup system already in place on the server or elsewhere? If so, you might be able to piggyback on that.

As I mentioned...did I mention it? Damned flu. Anyway. They are faithfully backing up every night by copying the data to a local hard drive then to a zip disk. They, and the staff person who get's stuck doing it after hours, would like to automate it.

The data easily fits on a CD. Several times over. I'd rather not to tapes since it's not a huge amount of data, and there's something really nicely accessible about a CD. So easy to find your data.

>
>If there is no backup system in place the client owes it to themselves to get a good one for the server at least. There, CD will probably not be practical; modern DAT tape would likely be a better choice. The built-in W2K Backup applet may be sufficient; if not they could invest in something like Veritas Backup Exec (W2K Backup is basically BE "Lite").

Ed mnetioned the W2K backup applet, too, in a phone conversation. Thanks for the suggestion.

>If the POS workstations are all the same or similar and don't change often, you could consider a drive/partition imaging product like PowerQuest Drive Image or Norton Ghost.

That's an interesting point in addition to backing up, even. You know it's silly, but I got PowerQuest and couldn't figure out how to make an image to a device other than the drive I wanted the image of. So, dropped it. Or, rather, put it on my list of things to do on a rainy day. Anyway. Good point.

>It's also worth noting that some enterprise server backup apps include agents that can be loaded on client PCs to include them in regular backups. If a large enough tape drive or changer/jukebox is used the entire network can be backed up on a scheduled basis.

Yep. Good points.