Critique my upcoming Backup System

[bob4432]

Main HDD
Adaptec SCSI Card
Quantm DLT Tape Drive
1 Removeable HDD Case
2 Removeable HDDs

here is my plan:

the main hdd is partitioned and all the important data goes on one drive, so backup that to tape every night.

then, either once a week, ghost the entire hdd to one of the removeable hdds. the actual system settings never get changed so there will not be a problem with new users and such. the reason i want ghost is speed, just put ghosted hdd in and then retrieve the new data from tape, which will only be 24hrs old at most. if removeable hdd 1 fails, then i have 2, if that fails i will reinstall the os and then i have the data backuped on tape. what do you think of this?

 

[bob4432]

^^^ bump ^^^

 

[DrVos]

What kind of environment is this for? I imagine this is for your office. How much data do you think you'll need to back up?

If this is for your office, I'd reccommend at least a 2 week rotation for your tapes. Then if a user comes to you saying that he/she overwrote a file last week and didn't know it, you'd be able to pull from that day's tape. I like your idea of a week-end backup to a HD, but I'd suggest that you do something like a month end backup to a DLT Tape and taking it home with you. Having redundant backups in your office is great and all, but your data is screwed if there was flooding/fire/theft/etc.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: DrVos
What kind of environment is this for? I imagine this is for your office. How much data do you think you'll need to back up?

If this is for your office, I'd reccommend at least a 2 week rotation for your tapes. Then if a user comes to you saying that he/she overwrote a file last week and didn't know it, you'd be able to pull from that day's tape. I like your idea of a week-end backup to a HD, but I'd suggest that you do something like a month end backup to a DLT Tape and taking it home with you. Having redundant backups in your office is great and all, but your data is screwed if there was flooding/fire/theft/etc.

it will be for a small office, 6 computers, but not mine.

the current amount of data is ~30GB, and from what i read this particular format store 40GB uncompressed / 80GB compressed, so it will last me quite some time.

in this office, somebody will know within a couple of days if they screwed something up, and i am not there except when something goes really bad, so they will have to re-type the file.

this backup is mostly to save the company in case of a serious server crash. they backup some of the most used data to floppy (i know 🙁 ). if the server currently goes, then it will take about 2 years worth of work with it. if they can recover 98% of the data, they would be unscathed, because if something goes bad now, they will be paying more for data recovery than this tape / hdd backup will cost, if it could be recovered at all.