Advice on setting up an LTO system for backups

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Hi all. I'm looking for some advice!

My boss would like me to look into setting up a 'proper' backups system. We're a small video production company with just over 1TB to be backed up. However, not much of this changes day-to-day. Most of the media that changes daily is on our Avid Unity server which is a big mirrored RAID (designed to protect data if single drives etc die.. or something!). All that media is all on source tapes anyway so we're not worried about that. What we want to backup is other media/graphics files, and general admin files, all on a variety of shared computers/drives in the office. I'm only guessing wildly, but probably out of that 1TB of data, it could fluctuate from ~10GB to 250GB changing in any one day. It all depends on what jobs we're doing, and what's going on.

At the moment all backups are manual; we have a server upstairs where I copy over all the essentials like admin stuff, emails, some media/graphics etc.. I also burn some stuff to disc. All this is what we want to automate, preferably to LTO. Our boss lives in Jersey so i'm thinking that'd be an ideal place to take away the tapes!

I've looked into LTOs and I understand that for media companies (and others) they are pretty much the standard. What I can't make a decision on is what kinda of drive to get, as I can't really figure out how much we'll be backing up every day/week! What seems to be recommended is a full backup over the weekend, then incremental backups every evening. This sounds great, but if we're backing up over 1TB every weekend, we're going to need an autoleader/library LTO drive to use multiple tapes aren't we? It wont fit on one, and I sure as hell am not coming in to swap tapes!

As far as software goes, I used to work in a large post production facility where they had a large number of LTO drive/autoloaders working with Backup Exec. It seems to crop up on here quite a lot, is this generally the one to go for?

Also, a real silly question; How do the LTO drives connect up to our network? I know our Unity is a fibre optic cable to each editing machine, so I don't know if that's possible? I presume it'd be good to do it that way, but failing that is it just regular ethernet/LAN?

I'd appreciate any advice, I'm kinda winging it here!

 

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Hi guys. Thanks very much for the info. Please bear with me as i'm no sys admin or IT tech! To answer the main point, no our files are not all centralised. We have one desktop with over 1TB of space which we use as our Media server. This is essentially the 'server' for our creative workings. Graphics, renders, music, DVD authoring.. pretty much anything that isn't stored on our Avid Unity. This is 2 drives which are shared across the office. As for filesizes it's a total mixed bag. There are some videos >1GB but it's not common. The rest is a hell of a lot of PSDs, DVD Authoring files, other images, etc..

On top of that we have two other desktops with 'admin/office' shares which are for our office team (i.e. non-creatives), with basically all admin files.. Word docs, spreadsheets... all that junk. So in total that is 4 different drives across 3 different desktops. Having said that, anything in My Documents on any of the workstations is probably not worth worrying about as it'd be personal.

Sin_Chase you're right in that the backup is at the moment just a fallback. It's more in case the whole building sets on fire or something! Having said that, if one authoring file is a week old but we've been working on that all week, that week-old file is next to useless! That's why i was thinking about incremental backups to catch anything that changes. Having said that, as it stands we only do a backup of our Avid projects (i.e. the edit authoring files) once a week!

I think what i'm trying to say is that yes, the majority of the data will act more as an archive to be filed away and forgotten, but due to the nature of the business we also need to keep backups of authoring files that are <1 week old.

Sin_Chase, what's a HBA? The agent to run on the desktop?

Ideally, in my mind what we want is a full backup every Friday. I've seen the price of the autoloaders and to be honest I dont think my boss will go for it! That leaves me with a single tape drive and needing to do a full backup once a week, so during the day. Will that kill the network?

Will it be really impossible to set up overnight incremental backups for Mon-Thurs? Bearing in mind the data is all over the place?

If we're talking about a backup plan the interesting thing is that my boss is in Mon+Tues normally, so it'd be ideal to have a full backup for him to take home on Tues evening. Isn't it rather pointless doing a full backup on Friday only to have it sit in the office until Tuesday, where it can go offsite?

Hmn. Lots to think about here!

 

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Well thanks a lot for the help guys. Unfortunately I just spoke to the boss today and we've got our wires crossed. Well, I know what we 'should' be doing/getting but he's not interested. He wanted me to look at getting a single tape drive simply to archive off some of our media in one hit. He's not really interested in setting up any kind of automated backup or anything by the sounds of it. He was looking at single DLT drives for £500, and thinking that will do. It'll be me sitting there for 10hrs to backup half the stuff. Nice.

Do you think that'd count as 'Implementing a tape archiving system and procedure' on my CV? lol.

I was speaking to a reseller on the phone today and he told me DLT was dead. Is this true? Would we be really extremely stupid to get a DLT drive? I can see the tapes are the same price as LTO4s... I'm of the belief that spending more on the drive would be worth it in the long run but I dont think my boss is!