Backup suggestions

[Blackbadger]

My media based work for clients has steadily grown in terms of project size over the years.

It has now searched a point where new projects are taking 500gig of data per client and will no doubt raise over time. I keep the development files so there are lots of duplications encase I need to (which I often do) roll back to a earlier revision of some work.

I am now starting to struggle with keeping all this data safe and available.
my funds are limited. But costs should be swallowed by clients if I must require addition hardware for them..

I'm considering getting Esata external drives for each client.
However I could end up with 15 external drives over a year.

Is tape still a suitable safe method of archiving data ?

Or I could build a beast of a file server, however this would be a expensive to build at first, plus the risk of a 1 point hardware failure could cripple my ability to work on anything.

Any thoughts or recommendations appreciated.

 

[yashiro]

15 drives you say? A drive per customer isn't such a bad idea on a small scale but there's not a lot of redundancy and it's a management nightmare later on. You need a double backup, really.
A server with many HD's and a tape solution. The tape is for archival/total disaster scenarios.
The tape could to some degree be replaced with another server or NAS box.

For a homebrew, server I'd definitely run a Solaris machine with ZFS.
Check this thread that spawned from my discussion about home servers.
It might require a bit of prior Linux/Solaris knowledge to get to grips with. If you've never used anything but Windows you will struggle a bit.

Another option is something like a NAS box. There are various ones available. QNAP, Synology, Netgear. They produce Nas boxes of varying sizes. There's also the Drobo. The 4 bay Drobo will be the easiest to setup and manage.

You could supply some details to Dell Business or Sun and see what solution they recommend. If the quote comes for free, you can at least rip their suggestions off when you do it yourself. Try asking in the server bit on these forums too for more advice.

 

[ChrisLX200]

You go beyond the home requirements with that request, you're talking significant investment to cover that. 'Several' backups of 500GB x 15 clients is > 20TB. With (say) 15 external 2TB drives you would probably encounter a drive failure a some point within a year, especially as external drives have a tougher life. eSATA is problematic too, connection failure and requirements to disconnect in a particular way to avoid data loss. Depends whether you can live with any failures at all. I think two RAIDED file servers with 8x2TB drives and a tape backup would be necessary to meet the requirement, and that isn't going to be cheap. We had exactly that (but using smaller drives) for storing MRI image data where I worked, we simply could not afford to lose data. It was all controled from a Solaris mainframe.

 

[Blackbadger]

Thanks for the responses chaps..

I guess a raided file server is the way to go.

I read the thread you posted, I think I need to read up on solaris.. eek more things to fill my head up with.