Best LTO-6 drive (or...?) for small business?

[destrekor]

For this small business I'm supporting at the moment, they don't have any feasible backup system in place. They use external drives that are connected to the servers - all eggs in one very convenient basket, in a wooden-framed building, in the country. So many disasters waiting to happen that I'm shocked they've escaped those worries this long.


So... I'm looking into tape for them. But I don't have a clue where to begin other than it seems LTO-6 is the dominant standard right now. Media seems quite cheap so no worry there, but... can anyone recommend a good drive?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How much data do they actually have to back up?

'cuz Tape is pretty slow, and pretty expensive, and probably not cost effective for small to medium amount of data.

 

[destrekor]

How much data do they actually have to back up?

'cuz Tape is pretty slow, and pretty expensive, and probably not cost effective for small to medium amount of data.

Rough estimate - about 1-1.5TiB.

Reason I'm looking at tape is because doing the jobs overnight should be just fine on LTO-6, and it would be very easy to have someone take them home and put them in a fireproof box.

They have a very slow internet connection so online backup is a no-go.

What else would you suggest?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Rough estimate - about 1-1.5TiB.

Reason I'm looking at tape is because doing the jobs overnight should be just fine on LTO-6, and it would be very easy to have someone take them home and put them in a fireproof box.

They have a very slow internet connection so online backup is a no-go.

What else would you suggest?

Hmm... well, diffed backups would probably be a lot smaller. So you might be able to upload depending on how "slow" your slow is and what your change rate is. Assuming you do the seed thing.

I mean, I have about 1.5TB uploaded to Crashplan from my home system, uploads about 5GB a day to keep it up to date.

But... yeah, that's actually probably pretty reasonable is you aren't a 24/7 shop, don't have a decent internet upload, want to keep it all in-house, etc.

 

[MustISO]

LTO6 is a good option along with a weekly tape rotation to an offsite location. Another option would be a disk based backup appliance but with a slow connection offsite replication would probably be an issue.