Backing up strategy

Golden Ape

Golden Ape

Golden Ape

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18 Oct 2002
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Afternoon all. I'm not sure if this is really the best place for this thread but then I'm not sure where else to put it ...

Basically I'm looking for suggestions on what's the best backup strategy for a machine at work - in this case a windows XP machine in a university department that we keep all our data on. We've got it setup in RAID 5 and have about 1tb of data which we add to at a rate of about 100/200mb a day.

The question is how else should we be backing this up - I'm particulary interested to know how the same sort of thing is dealt with in the private sector. Our current best idea is to have a set of external drives that we backup to on some sort of rotating schedule. Though to be fair this is a bit clunky and depends very much of rembering to move the drives around etc etc. I guess DVDs aren't really an option due to the size of the data set. Do people still use tapes? I'd really appreciate any suggestions thanks.
 
At work we backup our data off site overnight using a service provided by another company.

A lot of places still use tapes I believe though, we did previously.
 
we use tapes at my place. Get a working weeks worth of tapes and rotate them each day and it is backed up every evening at about 11pm.
 
Golden Ape said:
Interesting to hear that tapes are still used - any idea how much data you can fit on those things?
Click to expand...
I think you can get 500gb on some tapes - that's a wild, vivid recall from the lurky, dusty depths of my mind though. :o:p
 
Golden Ape said:
Interesting to hear that tapes are still used - any idea how much data you can fit on those things?
Click to expand...

Where I currently work we backup over a tb of data every night
5x 200/400 tapes and 3x 100/200 tapes in 2 autoloaders

At my previous company we ran an offsite backup service for our clients.

basmic said:
I think you can get 500gb on some tapes - that's a wild, vivid recall from the lurky, dusty depths of my mind though. :o:p
Click to expand...
The new LTO4 devices are 800/1600
 
We have amonsgt a lot of other things, a TB of data that must be backed up every day. We use another TB of harddisks, in a Dell NAS box, with windows server and some software to do backups, and allows us to restore certain files and all sorts of neat stuff. Then we also do a daily back up to tape of the previous days back up, and we have a months worth or a week can't remember.
 
Tapes are great for backing up data, we use a 100/200GB Ultrium and a 400/800GB Ultirum 3, and as said above, you can get 1600GB on a tape, but not cheap to buy the drives, they are about £3500 each, plus the software, like BackupExec.

In an environment where you have a relatively small amount of data like under 1TB, tapes are the best media, they are quick, our fileserver has around 400GB on it and that is backed up in around an hour iirc. If you have more data, then a tape library is the best option, if you have LOTS of data, you are more likely to use backup servers with cheap and cheerful drives and lots of them, back it up nightly, maybe a full or incremental, then offload that to a stack of tapes once a week or so.
 
if money is a problem

then maybe having another pc with a big raid5 array is a good way of keeping a backup of the files

not as 'good' as backup tapes though, since they can be taken off site easily :)
 
The only problem with another pc is that if the network was to have a virus it is likely that all pcs are effected.

If you can't afford a tape drive. Tape is king still IMO. I'd buy two or three 1TB external drives. Have at least one of them offsite in case of theft and fire.

If possible you may want to purchase some backup software like Symantec Backup Exec to run you backups efficiently. There are cheaper software alternatives too.
 
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