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I have not been keeping up on the tech in this area and I have very little clue where to begin.
My backup needs are as follows:
Exchange server (13Gb and rising, i expect no more than 25Gb total for the next year or 2)
File server (5.2GB current, expect no more than 10GB)
SQL Server (not in use now but is expected to be installed)
Sys state for 4 servers (size?)
(Too much space is better than too little)
Total needs: 20Gb Currently 50GB max
Thanks for your time.
DLT IV tapes are a bit less expensive but hold 40GB Native and 80GB compressed. The drives are a bit less expensive than LTO drives. Get a DLT 8000 drive. LTO and DLT tapes are enterprise level Linear Tapes, they are much faster than my next option, but more expensive.
You can also go with 4mm DDS tapes. DAT72 or DDS-4 will work. DAT72 tapes will do 36GB native and 72GB compressed. This might be a good option because this drive is backwards compatible with DDS-3 (12GB native/24GB compressed) and DDS-4 tapes (20GB native/40GB compressed) as well.
Hope that can start your research.
Instead I tend to prefer throwing in another hard drive or two. It'll be faster and easier to replicate your data that way and provides much more control IMO.
If you need the tape because you're swapping offsite, it's a simple matter of getting some hotswap drive trays and then swapping drives instead of tapes. If you go this route you can actually mirror your entire drive to a swappable unit. Then if the primary drive dies, you pull it out drop in the backup and restart.
@RussellC:
I think the DTL would be the best bet for me.
any specific brand?
You recommended the dlt8000 but the only cache for me is that the servers here are all IDE/SATA we don't run any scsi here.
It is more cost effective for us to have sata raids than to use scsi.
That said an external usb or firewire drive would also work for us.
The servers are all on a gigabit network and they backup to a file share on one server right now.
We would then archive that backup to the tape.(Disk to tape)
Nothing will backup directly to tape.
We would keep the last 2 full backups on the server at any given time in addition to a tape backup.
After 2 weeks we would then delete the disk backup and keep the tape for archival / emergency purposes.
@both:
Any medium will fail thats a given.
After all "If data doesn't exist in 2 places it does not exist at all"
Thanks for the input both of you.
I agree with you on the SATA RAID, much more cost effective. I have a server that is 2.5TB that is all 250GB SATA drives, but it is on a SCSI backplane.
Instead I tend to prefer throwing in another hard drive or two.
Nothing stopping you from having three hard drives and swapping them in rotation. You can set it up so that the media is HD instead of tape, otherwise not much difference other than the lower number of swaps (and even that you could change with a few scripts). That's good and bad - less swapping=less chance for manual error, but more chance for media error. But I'm not too concerned about media error with HD's, and very concerned about it with tape.
There's a variety of configurations one can use that far outstrip tape from the automation standpoint as long as you're prepared to accept that HD media is better than tape (just been my experience). And if you accept that, then backups to HD's are easier and more robust to automate.
If you gonna leave tapes in a multi-tape carousel you may as well use hard drives like you describe above.The good thing about tape is the low cost of removable storage.
Ejecting and changing a tape every day is a chore but becomes a habit, just like turning the lights on. If you write the day names on the tapes its hard to get it wrong.
I HATE tape drives. Same old story, they're not cleaned as often as they should be, or someone left a bare tape on top of something that affected the magnetic tracks on the tape, or a variety of other reasons.
The thing with HDD-based backups is that you don't need to have them in expensive removable hot-swappable trays or anything. There are cheap solutions for 2.5" laptop hard drives that hold over 100GB. If you don't mind carrying the "extra weight" of a full-sized hard drive, well, you're looking at 300GB+. Put the drive into a USB or Firewire enclosure, and you can now easily "hot swap" your hard drives. You can keep your old tape rotation in place, with your monthly full backups offsite, say at a safety deposit box, or whatever. Rotate out the drives as though they were tapes.
The added benefit is that now the drive is usable and testable on any system you could throw at it. You can take that backup, and say you want to replicate your data to another disk so that there's a yearly backup that you'd like to create. Well, rather than having to take your tape and dump it on the server that it's connected to (or using rmt or some other remote tape access) or having to buy yourself another insanely expensive tape drive that will read your tapes, you just plug it into your desktop, mount it, plug in the new fresh drive, mount it, and copy away.
Not to say that using HDDs to do your backups doesn't have its pitfalls, but, by and large, the compatability and the storage capacity outweighs the clunkiness I feel tapes have.
That's why I like and I trust hard drives so much more than tapes.
I'm sure that this is just adding fuel to the fire, but I had to comment. :)
Tape drives are not expensive, you can get Seagate 20Gb Trevans for $20 on ebay.
Clunky - Clumsy in form or manner; awkward.
Transfer to off site HD is ideal ..the chances of the remote HD drive motor failing are infinitessimal ( but do exist )..tape drive capstans ( transport systems )..did you ever own an 8 track or cassette player ..
with tape $hit happens more often than HD ..or ram or what you will .
I too have not kept up to date on backup technology. I was thinking of buying an external HD and some specific software that will allow me to back up each machine easily. Is this a reasonable idea? Is there any software considered the best in this area? They are all windows machines but I've had the windows backup utility fail on me and don't trust it.
I've had hard drive die recently and it was a total pain obviously, I'd love to be able to just burn the disk image and system settings and be able to restore it easily.
I was thinking like a 300GB or 500GB drive which would be plenty for all computers. Any suggestions?
See my last post in that thread. You'll likely have to tailor that somehow if you're running MS on the desktops. Maybe set up samba and have the backup server pull the files across the network. Either way, a backup server is an effective and very cheap way to go. A slow computer, a big hard drive or two, and a dvd burner to make archives and clean up once a week or once a month. After that it's just a matter of finding the right software to push files around.
Hard drive backups can be flexible.
- Mirror the hard drives.
- rsync separate partitions to a linux/unix os
- snapshot levels (fulls, daily incrementals)
to an external raid.
- only thing to consider is cost of hard drives.
the software can be free or fairly inexpensive.
- Even with windows, do a system backup to a
different drive letter.
