Disk backup - archive storage

[gshaw]

Another quick straw poll for people using disk as their primary backup store... what do you use for longer-term archiving?

 

I'd want to ensure I'd have at least weekly backups going onto separate media from a live server, question is what's best these days...

 

- tape... looking at LTO4 or LTO5 for that, around £1.5k for the drive + tapes

- removable hard drive... pretty cheap and say 2-3TB capacity per drive used, although perhaps not as rugged as tape?

- online backup... sounds ideal until you see the monthly prices if you're storing >500GB of data

 

Now we're virtual I'd want to be backing up the VMs as well as the data in order to be able to recover quickly if the need arises, seems to be missing a lot of the benefits of virtualising otherwise.

 

Your thoughts?

[RabbieBurns]

we use disk to disk then disk to tape

 

currently using a single lto4 drive, but have just taken delivery of a dell tape library 50 tape autoloader and 50 lto5 tapes, which is on my list of things to get set up asap.

[gshaw]

One other option I've seen... RDX drive which would allow for the benefits of fast backup speeds and would work well with Veeam but in a rugged cartridge form...

[Norphy]

We're doing disk to disk to tape as well. We have a 12TB direct attached storage array connected to our backup server which then gets backed up onto tape. We have a 32 slot, two drive LTO4 autoloader from Dell and we're using Commvault Simpana to do the actual backing up. They have a virtual machine agent which works with ESX(i), vSphere and HyperV.