What really basic backup software for a single tape drive?

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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 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?

 

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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?

 

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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.

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?

 

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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

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.