Just a few questions:

my database is now 85 gb and growing every day. What is the best way to back this up, is there a cloud service you would recommend?

also, I have a table with a container field and it holds all of our companies pdf copies of documents. I’m considering storing that fields data on an external drive since it makes up the bulk of the 85 gigabytes. Is this a good idea or do you all have any recommendations?

thank you!

3 hours ago, wattmhite said:

 have a table with a container field and it holds all of our companies pdf copies of documents. I’m considering storing that fields data on an external drive since it makes up the bulk of the 85 gigabytes. Is this a good idea or do you all have any recommendations?

I would recommend using external container storage for this field, to separate the container data from your FileMaker file. I can't really comment on an external drive vs an internal one, though, as that's not really the deciding factor.

3 hours ago, wattmhite said:

What is the best way to back this up

This might not sound helpful, but I'm dead serious... The best backup is one that addresses your companies Disaster Recovery Policy. So, if your company can live with a day's worth of data-loss, then your backup procedure would be very different than if it isn't willing to live with more than 5 minutes of data loss. They would also have to expect to pay exponentially more for a disaster recover plan that can guarantee no more than 5 minutes of data loss.

That being said, you'll likely want a mix of short-term/frequent/local backups (progressive backup) and longer-term/less frequent/external backups. I've written scripts to send zipped backups Amazon S3, I've heard others that use Dropbox, then there are services like http://360works.com/filemaker-offsite-backup/.