Corporate backup solution ( 2 Views )

The final piece to upgrading my companies existing backup solution is figuring out which tape/tape drive combo i am going to be using. I need a tape drive with atleast 500gb of storage capacity since i am backuping up everything on the network to this tape once a week. I have found the Sony SAIT-1 500gb external storage drive, and the tapes to go along with it. But a co-worker of mine found an LT0/LT0-3 tape drive with the same capacity. Are both industry standards and which one would be better for the long run/overall that anyone on here has worked with? Or does anyone know of another solution? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-kyle

(AS, Syrian Arab Republic)

Honestly? My recommendation?

Ditch tape. For the cost of a high capacity backup solution based on tape, I instead purchased 2 computers with large harddrives in a mirror setup.

Those are my backup solutions. The primary system pulls all the data off the network to backup and archives it, then the backup-backup server takes rsync'd copies of the backup directory.

Once a quarter, I remove the mirror set from the backup backup, seal and mail it off to my lawyer. I rebuild the raid set off of other disks I have put aside for this very reason, and off I go.

And it still comes out cheaper and easier to work with than tape.

(Can, Turks and Caicos Islands)

LTO is an industry standard format, used by many maufacturers, while the Sony is a proprietory interface. Tape costs demonstrate that- the Sony's tapes run typically almost $200 ea., while an LTO-3 tape is a little over $100.00.

Quantum has recently released their newest DLT based solution, dubbed DLT V4, which is an improvement on the tried-n-true DLT format. It uses VS160, which is quite inexpensive (yet long ife) and has a capacity of 160n/320c, at a transfer rate of 20Mb/sec. Its biggest advantage is cost- these things are cheap! About a grand for a 160/320 is incredible, and combining that with low media costs makes it a winner. They also offer it in the 16-tape autoloader SuperLoader 3, for capacities up to 1280Gb native / 2560Gb compressed. And this autoloader is only about 15% more than a stand-alone LTO-3 drive!

But LTO-3 is the speed king- you're talking up to 324Gb/hr transfer rates!!! That's pretty outrageous.

IMO, using solutions like additional PC's and storage units are no replacement for true backups. Backups need to be run daily (not weekly!) and the media taken off-site!! Any solution that leaves the media in the same building/area, is not a backup. It offers no safety against catastrophic disaster. Remote SANs or NAS Co-lo'd in other locations is a completely different matter, but a high dollar solution.

(naim, Chile)

Quote:

Originally Posted by twwabw

IMO, using solutions like additional PC's and storage units are no replacement for true backups. Backups need to be run daily (not weekly!) and the media taken off-site!! Any solution that leaves the media in the same building/area, is not a backup. It offers no safety against catastrophic disaster. Remote SANs or NAS Co-lo'd in other locations is a completely different matter, but a high dollar solution.

My backup servers archive some stuff hourly, everything else is daily.

Nightly, this server and the backup system at my remote location rsync their backup directories to each other.

No high dollar, we're still talking cheaper than tape. Not only do I have a live copy of the data ( up to an hour old in some cases ), but if the building goes BOOM, I have a copy at a remote location.

In my opinion, the only thing tape offers over my solution is the seperation of media and reader. Which is precisely why I keep the backup on a raid 1 array, and anything I send to the lawyer is on a couple drives in a raid1 configuration.

(ceyhun, Iceland)

I've had a lot of problems with Sony drives. They have quility control issues and are overpriced. I would recomend from experience to not use Sony.

(kýymet, Bermuda)

EDIT: Double Post...

(furkan, Nauru)

Quote:

Originally Posted by XOR != OR

I like your idea for small business whp don't have a lot to backup. but to try to push 500GB nightly to a remote location is going to cost a lot of money. no way a T1 can handle that.

I think the DLT auto loader is the right solution here as long as you can get it backed up in a timely fashion.

(özlem, Belize)

tape drives are better than a second computer in the same room for when a water pipe upstairs breaks and water comes into your server room. ask me how i know. thankfully the only thing we lost was the 16 port network hub (it was on top of the rack), but there were water drops on the motherboard (the one spot w/o any traces) and down the face/top of the monitor (probably a good thing that i turn that off when i'm not in there)

The remote synchronization sounds like a good idea if you have that available. so i'm assuming that just sends whatever files have changed, sort of an incremental backup instead of a full backup each time it runs?

(nural, Armenia)

Quote:

Originally Posted by black_b[ ]x

The remote synchronization sounds like a good idea if you have that available. so i'm assuming that just sends whatever files have changed, sort of an incremental backup instead of a full backup each time it runs?

Yup.

Ask any unix/linux admin what tools they couldn't live without, and without a doubt rsync will show up in that list.

Incremental file changes are transfered.

oakfan52, I am doing about 120gigs right now across a t1 ( well, t1 to dsl 2mb/768 ). Of course, I only have a few hundred megs ( at most ) change daily, so that's a big reason I can get away with it.

(brck, Singapore)

Quote:

Originally Posted by XOR != OR

ya,

He used the word corporate so i assume large business with large amounts of data. You look at Windows Server 2003 R2 yet? DFSR uses Remote Differential Compression. It replicates only the parts of files (not the whole file) that has changed.

(büþra, Saint Pierre and Miquelon)

Quote:

Originally Posted by oakfan52

That's what rsync does.

Which is why linux folks swear by it.

(tolga, Yemen)

Corporate backup solution ( 2 Views )

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