Nas

I work in a small business and need to solve our backup/archive problems.

Ideally I would like something with hard drives that are hot swappable and cloned, so drive could be taken off site or moved to a safe for safe keeping.

As our files are so big, DVD backup isn't really a good archive process anymore.
Is there a system available which works with mac where I can archive to a cloned drive and remove them for use later? (so I'll have 2 drives of the same thing for security) I recently tried the Seagate NAS 420, but if you remove a drive from it, it no longer recognises it and you have to rebuild it.... obviously no good for what I need. If anyone has any other ideas, It would be greatly appreciated!

Some jobs we have are around 4gb, so I need to be working with 2TB drives realistically to archive large volumes of work.

That drive, I believe, is a RAID drive, and you can't pull drives from it willy nilly. There's no real hot swap drive enclosures for what you're trying to do. I'd just buy 2 drive, each at 2TB, Firewire, and put them on one Mac, set it up to share. Back up. Then remove it, plug the second one in, take the first home. It's just a FW cable, so it's easier than pulling out and shoving in a whole drive. Simple, easy, fewer moving parts. But a RAID drive is not doing to do what you want, unless you have two RAID enclosures and do what I suggested.

There are some on-line backup solutions that are subscription based that work great, are very secure, and off site.

RAID's native functionality will prevent you from hot-swapping drives, so no real NAS or anything will really suit your needs for that purpose. If you wish to off-site a backup of your data, then you're thinking tapes or something. So perhaps you can use a RAID'ed NAS to store all of your data and then run a backup job from the NAS to a tape which can be safely put into a safe..

Regards