hi guys,
Our back up tape drive is not big enough to back everything up,
so i have been given a option to either have a bigger tape drive and tapes installed at a price of around £1000 or go for a external hardrive of around 500gb which is about £80.
Obviously the price is a massive difference but what do you think is the best option to go for??
A selection of external hard drives maybe, so that you can still keep a backup schedule running and remove the drive for storage once a backup's completed. Also means that if one drive fails, you have redundancy.
We have just had a D2D2Tape system installed which was very expensive but it has really REALLY helped with providing a massively stable backup solution.
First things first, how much data are you backing up? (i know you said about the 500gb, but would be good to know)
ta
Tony
Personall if its a price difference of that, i would go with an external drive...
and i might be wrong, but isn't it quicker to backup to an external drive than a Tape Drive.
We currently use both, but dont tend to back much up to the tape drive anymore, although a tape drive is more stable i suppose
James.
Backing up to a drive is great, but what sort of disaster recovery do you have if there is a fire?
tapes can be taken out and stored away from the server room/off site.
Got exactly the same problem at one of my schools, going to continue backing up admin/SIMS stuff to tape on a daily basis, and getting a couple of hard drives (so that one is always off site).
The plan is to do a full back up over the weekend and remove it on Monday. If time permits (pretty sure the server is USB 1.1) may do an incremental back up to drive daily after the admin stuff has backed up.
This is for a primary school, so may not be suitable for anything higher. I'd prefer to have more drives in rotation, but I don't think that the budget will allow.
If you do go with the external HDD option you really need to buy a separate drive for each individual tape you'd have bought in order to give you the same level of resiliency as the tape drive solution.Originally Posted by mikeymike
External drives can cost as little as £70-100 for 1tb...
My last school really didn't value the sims data but I am sure that would change if they were to lose it!?
What about paying for off site backup with someone ? all of the data at my last school (primary, 50gb) to about 500 a year, something like that i believe.. that is one option!?
Tony
Anything going off site really needs to be encrypted now too, I'm using an LTO4 with backup exec 12.5 to do the encryption (hardware).
The LTO4 is considerably faster than the RAID 0 array on the xserve raid I'm using for D2D2T staging.
For peak tape speeds encrypted write is around 3500MB/Min, Verify 7000MB/min
Data Barracks who we used were using encryption that was military standard.
No one was going to get into THAT!
You have to look beyond the price per megabyte. Tapes might seem slower and more expensive but I've seen far too many USB external hard drives fail to risk it.
They're barely good enough for reliable home use which is why we don't use IDE drives in servers.
at the moment its around 40gb and our tapes are only 32gb, but with more staff and pupils becoming better computer litarate its only going to increase.
How would offsite backups suit you?
40gb - you can get dats for thats.
The problem you will face with HDDs is that you have to have some kind of rotation, backing up is the easy part as you know, making it resilient is the tricky bit.
Tapes are the way to go unless you want to do it all off site.
that is only my opinion though :P
We have LTO2 Drives, you need a SCSI card for them though
200gb Uncompressed / 400 Compressed , fast as well.
We used to use an Iomega REV drive which is wont reccoment, disk faulure on that was a nightmare!
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