Tape drives (LTO) and backups. Some questions.

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I've got a requirement from a group in the office to back up 1TB per month and store it for 5 years. The data is mainly video content, with some of the monthly backups being incremental, but a lot of it being brand new stuff.

My natural inclination is to go for a tape solution, but I've got some questions about this that an expert could help me out with.

1) Should I go LTO4 or LTO5? My understanding is that 5 can store more per tape, but is a lot more expensive (clicking around, LTO5 tapes are £80, LTO4 are £25.).

2) How much would you spend on a tape drive? I don't need autoloading magic, it's going to live in an office next to the Macs we need to backup.

3) What interfaces do tape drives have? I've seen SCSI and other direct access ones, but do any have IP connectivity to enable backups over the network?

4) What'd be the sort of software I'd be using for backing up directories (on a Mac) to any sort of tape drive? Anything that's fool-proof?

If tapes are completely the wrong option and I should be using something else instead, feel free to suggest it :)
 
Imo, go with LTO4, avoid Dell drives, stick with HP, the powervault LTO4 and sas card will probably come in at around £1500, plus media, plus the additional cost of archiving a tape every month and then maybe backup exec with some mac agents.

All of which will need to be on a pc which has a pci-x interface.

What's your budget?
 
1) LTO4 for the drive, a mixture of maturity and lower costs than LTO5.

2) How much is the data worth? £1500 isn't unreasonable for a stand alone drive.

3) Most LTO4 drives are SAS these days. You'll need an adapter card in the server (assuming you have one).

4) Backup Exec is the easiest backup software to use really.

Total costs:

Sp00n- Why not Dell tape drives? The LTO3 ones had lots of problems, but the LTO4 drive have been flawless so far.
 
Interesting article. Budget is probably less than £5k. The macs being backed up are actually Macbook Pros, so I don't think I can use a SAS expansion card.

I'm guessing what I then need to do is get a server, plug the tape drive into that and expose it on the network? Is Backup Exec still a sensible choice of software if I go down that road?
 
Get a server, connect the tape drive and put it on the network, yes.
You may want to look at getting something like a HP ML110 or a Dell PowerEdge Tower server, something which will last at least 5 years. (By the sounds of it, you don't already have a server?)

Backup Exec is still a good choice (imo).
Edit: I can't see a BE agent for Mac, maybe it isn't appropriate?
 
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Retrospect sucks monkey balls! I had months of problems with it on OS X. We us NetVault Backup at one place, does a fantastic job and is simple to use on the whole.

Unfortunately it seems slightly aimed towards autoloading tape libraries and whatnot - so running multiple-tape backups requires a bit of attention from someone at the office :D
 
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