Backup each department's essential data, over the network, to another
department's machine. You'll be protected against catastrophic hardware
failure, but not against fire, malice, theft, or Flouridation.

Put it into terms of money!   Management understands money.
"How much money will it cost in man hours/temp employees etc to put the
lost data back into the PC's?"   Compare that to a few backup drives.

Now adays you can buy very simple $100 or less 2.5 inch USB drives and
use a simple scheduled backup program.   Haven't finished looking at
CDBackupXP but it looks pretty good.  Not sure about the schedule thing.

That way nobody would have to do anything but the data would be backed up.

You might also buy a 500gig external and put it on the server and let
everyone map to it and backup to that.   Not sure if this will work in
every environment.  These things are well in the 100-199$ range now adays.

There's really no winning with some people.

All you can do is present - in writing - your logical and well research
reasons.  When they get turned down - you have proof of what you suggested.
Now - go find a job elsewhere - things will go bad where you are now.

As for your direct question of how to respond to your bosses "why" question
about whether or not an end user will burn 100+GB of data to DVD
periodically.  Ask your boss when the last time they burned 25 DVDs of
non-repetative material to DVD that was all their files... and then when
they finished thought to themselves, "I can do that again next week, no
problem."

Of course - what your boss it really saying is, "We have no critical data.
If they lose it - it's their problem.  We didn't need their data anyway."

Suggestion still the same - find work elsewhere.

A microsoft tech has said "A great back-up is the File-Transfer-Wizard" run
from xp or xp cd.With this one can select files/data/settings,etc to back
up,&
if xp crashes,or hd gets toasted,all youre data is saved.Save data to new
folder,
once thru,move to cd or dvd.Plus,you can use this on any OS running xp...

You only need a backup of your data has value, your boss believes that
the company data has no value.

Even a cheap 500GB RAID-1 Snap Drive will cost about $1,100, so a small
file server with tape drive is not a lot more when you consider the
costs:

Server 2003 Standard $800 - licenses as needed
Small File Server hardware - $2000
LTO-2 External Tape drive and 12 tapes - $1300

Benefits - common storage with file security, master backup that can be
taken off site or put in fire safe, easy to use/understand and easy to
check if backups are good or not.

Department heads have little spare time to perform regular scheduled data
backups,
they will put it off till they find the time, return from a series of
meetings
(which means they didn't have the time that day) or get back from a business
trip.

Employees will invariably find one excuse or another as to why they should
not, will not or I forgot to.

If management believes the data they want to backup is valuable, have them
put a dollar value as the
worth of this data.

Then they will find that the cost of a server and raid drives and a method
for off site
(that meets security requirements) storage is not all that costly.

JS

Simple. Is it worth the cost for each employee to rebuild their data vs. a
real backup scheme in the event of catastrophic failure of any origin?  If
your boss can keep his conclusion in mind for any length of time, you should
be hiring some ITs real quick and equipment to support it.

It's not a specific answer to your question, but you might find
something useful to you in this article on backup I recently wrote:

http://www.computorcompanion.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=314