Going to be changing tape backup systems soon as were close to outgrowing whats really managable with our current setup. A bit out of touch with tapes though, whats the best at the moment? needs to hold at least 160GB per tape, what would people recommend? AIT/DAT/DLT/LTO/etc.
What tape backup system?
- Thread starter ubersonic
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Yeah, cloud storage isn't viable sadly as were out in the sticks and can't justify the cost of a leased line or anything like that, we only have an 1184 Kbps upload rate.
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or even Hot Swap Hard Drives.
To be honest never needed tape backups, and struggle to see their relevance today.
1. Presumably you still need someone to swap tapes daily?
2. Random Access (e.g. single file that someone has deleted) for recovery is still hard or slow?
3. Need for spare tape drive in case tape drive dies and can no longer source model that reads existing tapes?
4. Capacity no longer that great for Tapes, when you can get 3 or 4TB Hard Drives?
Associate
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LTO tapes are the best bet.
Can get LTO 3 tapes and drives quite cheap and hold a good amount of data
Jake
Can get LTO 3 tapes and drives quite cheap and hold a good amount of data
Jake
They are still very relevent as RAID is redundancy not a backup, tapes are very cheap and with a decent GFS rotation you can quickly recover individual files or an entire system from any day in the last fortnight or any month in the last year.
Having somebody swap a tape on their way home at the end of the day takes literally <1 minute, capacity of tapes has increased slower than HDD's but we only have about 100 gig to backup nightly so it works fine for us
Heh, funny guy
Thanks dude.
I didn't mention RAID - literally just a hot swap hard drive caddy - instead of swapping Tape daily, swap a hard drive caddy out for another one...
So would a hard drive caddy....
How much is a LTO-3 Drive... ~£800 was what I saw for a quick google for a 400Gb / 800Gb Compressed drive
Assuming you want 7 Day backup:
you could buy 7x 500GB Enterprise class Hard drives for £550
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-384-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=2270
leaving plenty of cash for some hot swap caddies.... completely standard and you can restore the drive in any PC... without needing a 2nd tape drive to restore on another machine.
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Ahh, I get you, when I saw you mention hard drives I thought you were just talking about RAID.
Problem is we would be looking at well over £1000 for enough drives for a full rotation, plus caddies and those are 3.5" drives I think so won't fit in the SAS backplane so we would also need some external ESATA thing maybe plus im not sure if the backup software even supports archiving to HDD.
Overall tape backup is much cheaper and user friendly hence why its still so popular, ~£500 for a 400GB LTO 400 drive and £150 of tapes and your set. with minimal fuss.
We use 2 LTO-4 drives at work (Dell Powervault 114X) and use Backup Exec. Works fine and is fairly fast for tape.
Hard drives weren't exactly designed to be portable plug-in un-plug so frequently, so i wouldn't advise using a hotswap solution. Hotswap should only really be used in the case of emergency (HDD failure or moving from one chassis to another).
Hard drives weren't exactly designed to be portable plug-in un-plug so frequently, so i wouldn't advise using a hotswap solution. Hotswap should only really be used in the case of emergency (HDD failure or moving from one chassis to another).
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Soldato
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I work in a large data centre that serves large/important clients (need a certain level of recognised security clearance just to go into the halls if that's any hint) and we have a full time media librarian who deals almost entirely with tapes, there's everything from dinky little slot-loaded libraries to those enormous modular Storagetek ones that cost a pretty penny - still very much in use.
Soldato
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You also need to consider future data growth and if you need off site storage in case of fire, flood etc.
LTO drives work well and the newer ones backup a lot faster.
LTO drives work well and the newer ones backup a lot faster.