What really basic backup software for a single tape drive?

Scam

Scam

Scam

Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2002
Posts
18,606
Location
London
Hello all. Following my last foray into these forums, I have finally got round to installing our single DLT tape drive.

In short, I have data to archive from:
- 2 drives totalling ~1TB, on same machine as tape drive
- 2 other drives on different PCs, both <10GB

I got slightly confused about what software i was getting with the tape drive, and as it happens I haven't been given any. Although it seems maybe i should have had a cut-down copy of Backup Exec :confused: We've got a Quantum DLT-V4.

Anyway, i've been looking at Windows Backup and to be honest it'd probably do what i want. In an ideal world I'd like to run off a full backup of the above now, then do this every few months. In the meantime an incremental backup of once per week would be fine. Would Windows Backup be able to do this?

How do you reinstate backups made with Windows Backup? We need some foolproof incase the machine completely dies. i.e. we need to be able to replace everything onto a brand new machine, should the worst happen (fire, theft etc.)

Any thoughts? :)
 
1) You are backing up 1TB of data on to a DLT-V4?

2) To do what you are asking, create 2 backup jobs and save them, one for the full backup and one for the incremental, then within ntbackup itself you can do the appropriate schedule (which just creates scheduled tasks for you control panel > scheduled tasks).

3) ntbackup cannot do bare metal backups but from the sounds of it you are only backing up files anyway so this shouldnt be a problem.
 
It'd be ~1TB to start with. So yep I'll need to sit with it at some point to do that 'full' backup :(

Basically that 1TB is a load of media, much of it very old. Once we've run it off onto a tape hopefully it will be severely cut down (but still a few tapes worth obviously). So to start with i'm essentially archiving old stuff we want to get rid of.

I also know I dont need to worry about doing a backup more than once a week, and that only needs to be an incremental one to catch what work/media has changed during the week. My problem is i dont really know how much data changes week in/week out. I guess that's going to be key in deciding whether or not i can leave it overnight or what.

I've had a play with the Windows Backup and it seems to do what i want (i didnt realise it did incremental etc.)

What do you mean by 3? :)
 
I've just re-read your first post and I think I may have mis-understood, bkf files (ntbackup file format) can be restored on to any computer and pretty much every windows computer has ntbackup included with it so you would literally just double click the file and chose the location to restore to.

Bare-metal backup means that you could literally restore an entire computer including windows/programs etc... to a completely different machine, but I realise now you are just talking about the data.

As a complete guess I would say that you would need 5/6 tapes for the full backup (depending on the data being backed up) and a single tape to run the incrementals on, but obviously this is completely dependent on how much data changes during the week.

Also, I would personally run the incremental everyday as losing a whole weeks worth of changes could be quite a pain.
 
Last edited:
Have you thought of just using a 2TB USB/ESATA drive instead of the DLT?

Its a right pain having to change multiply tapes by hand and those tapes dont last forever, it could become quite costly and time consuming.
 
Lanz said:
Have you thought of just using a 2TB USB/ESATA drive instead of the DLT?

Its a right pain having to change multiply tapes by hand and those tapes dont last forever, it could become quite costly and time consuming.
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that for archiving purposes tape was a lot safer and more durable. It seems to be the standard in my industry anyway.

Anyway, the drive is all installed and ready to go. I just need to figure out how to run off my first huge archive (1TB). After that I should think it'll be >1 tapes worth for sure.

Hmn. The DLT drive seems to say it'll do 10-20MB/s, is this accurate? What would i get in the real world?
 
Incremental backups are the devil.

Even at full pelt 20MB/Sec sustained (which you wont get on anything but large contiguous files) it is going to take you 13 hours to backup 1TB to that drive.

Are you archiving or backing up? 2 very different approaches needed.
 
Basically the long and the short of it is my boss wants to cut down that 1TB of media, as we're running out of space on the 2 drives it exists on. Probably at least half of it we will never need again, but he needs an archive of it just in case. That's how we got onto the subject of getting a tape drive to stick it all on. Unfortunately he wasnt prepared to pay any more than £500 or whatever, do i'm stuck with this DLT drive and a very long process - at least to start with!

So the idea is once we've run off that archive, we'll cut down that 1TB to something more manageable. Something like 500GB at a complete guess. Maybe (hopefully) even less. I then need to talk through with him how often he wants this media backed up. At the moment it's not at all. A nightly incremental would be ideal, but i don't think he'd want to spend the money on tapes. Since he's gone so long without any backup, i'm thinking he might say do a full backup once a month or so. But that would use loads of tapes anyway, unless we overwrite the same one every time :confused:

What should be easy to sort is the 20GB or so that we have of generic admin files. He wants that backed up once a week.
 
Just double checking that if you use NTBackup you're running Windows 2003?
Microsoft removed the ability to backup to Tape in 2008.
 
Depends on the size of your organisation but many years ago I used to ntbackup to a firewire external HDD, worked a treat.

I'd circulate six drives, mon-fri and a weekly, all full backups, the previous day's drive would go home with me in the boot of my car so if the building burnt down we'd have a backup.

For security purposes we purchased a hight temp fire proof safe and kept the drives in there. They still use this system to this day (7 years later) without issue.
 
Scam; Keep in mind whatever you put on a tape drive (and however long you take doing it) it takes even longer to get it off the tape.
Tell that to your boss, and then say "Is the cost of me, or anyone doing all this fiddling around with tapes really not worth spending the money in the first place for a good drive?"

If he still thinks it's cost effective, Bleek's system sounds good if a tiny bit ghetto ;) (no offence)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom