Got a new 300gig sas server on raid 1. What sthe best external backup? tape?online?

[mmx]

I already have a raid 1 300gig sas dell 2900 server.

I now need a tape backup and online storage.

What do you gys recommend?

 

[nweaver]

Any modern tape drive (may need a library, if you don't want to swap tapes every few days) with decent backup softare (NT Backup is not that great)

Make sure you have your rotation/storage/etc in your DRP, and then follow it.

 

[skyking]

Make sure you have your rotation/storage/etc in your DRP, and then follow it.

I am looking at that for my work. They run rotating backups weeknightly to a different drive. I was copying it over to another building for offsite safety, but have advised them they really have no backup as-is and need a tape drive.
What do you think about taking weekly tapes offsite, keep one a month and rotate through the rest? What kind of tape life should I expect?

 

[mmx]

What are some of the drives that you guys are looking at?

I want to have the less HANDS ON the better. I also need an OFF-SITE backup ike online storage or some sort. What are you guys thinking?

 

[skyking]

off site can be taking a tape offsite.
That is what I have in mind.
Pushing gigs of stuff offsite every night gets very costly.

 

[mmx]

Guys I think I'm bying the dell tape drives for $1500, is this a good deal? Urinium tapes?

What is a good backup -online service.?

 

[d3n]

Those Dell 2900s are spiffy.

 

[nweaver]

most tape companies do EXTENSIVE testing on MTBF, tape life, etc. How often/what kind of/where/what data questions should ALL be addressed in a formal DRP, as then it's published and signed off on by mgmt.

 

[cmetz]

mmx, LTO2/LTO3 seems to be the tape format of choice these days. I've had good experiences with the IBM made drives (some but not all of the ones Dell resells are these - I think the faster ones not the cheaper ones). Dell can also give you decent pricing on the tape media if your sales person is feeling helpful.

I don't particularly like "shoe-shine" tape designs like LTO, but they appear to hold up in practice.

I have been a DDS (DAT) fan for many years, but the technology simply hasn't scaled. 36GB DAT72 capacity vs. 400GB LTO3 capacity.

Ignore compressed capacity numbers when speccing a tape solution, it's marketing BS. Turn compression off when backing up, or you will learn intimately about how your solution handles the end of the tape.

For low-end / low-cost folks, I am using SATA virtual tape solutions a lot now. It works okay, and if it's off-site and you've got the bandwidth it can be a reasonable DR approach. Good tape solutions are expensive and requires ongoing labor to manage the tapes and ongoing testing to make sure you can restore (oh yeah, if you don't do periodic test restores, you will regret it). Simply put, doing backups / DR right is expensive, and often times it's hard to convince management to do it right even though it's fundamentally an insurance policy against losing business-critical data.

 

[mmx]

Here is the situation.

In the last 4 years, they are working with up to 2gig worth of files (word, excel, and quickbooks) However weekly only about 20mb are added or changes.
However due to the idea to have a papaer-free office, we got raid-1 300gig sas drives.

Now, I want to be ble to backup everything, however I don't see a need for a 400gig backup right now. In terms of backup, can all lto drives accept all tapes? is the difference in drive write?
Can you guys reccomend a tape drive?
Also need an online backup, which will allow backup off-site, and but that it has the funcction to backup only changed files since last backup?

 

[mmx]

ttt

 

[acaeti]

You could get some sort of VPS or colocate a server off site and use rsync and diff to do the backups. If your daily changed/added data is only 20mb, that can be sent out a T1 or similar in short order nightly.

You can also apply pretty much everything people say about tape to USB or firewire (I recommend firewire) HDs. But it really needs to be part of a routine otherwise you will of course run into problems. That's the nice thing about having an offsite vps or colo - you can script it with cron in linux to do the backup for you, even compress it - then you only have to worry about doing periodic test restores. There's a million howto's on the net about using rsync and other linux apps to do backup, here's a few to start:

Backupninja
Debian Administration Howto for remote encrypted
rdiff-backup on debian

 

[mmx]

I'll do the offsite later, but what is the best brand/spec/tape drive to get?

 

[Garion]

A good backup strategy should include a full server backup at least weekly and typically involves incremental or differential backups daily. (I usually like differentials, myself. Safer)

To make life easy on yourself it's best to minimize tape swapping. I always like to aim for one week's worth of backups without changing tapes. Think about this when choosing a tape drive or library and be sure to plan for growth - Tapes don't grow!

Here's an example. Let's say your server has 100 GB of storage used. Each day, a diff shows that 10 GB changes. (Yes, that's high, but you never know what's going to happen...). If that's so, you'll need to backup each night...

Sunday: Full backup - 100 GB
Monday: 10 GB (monday's changed files)
Tuesday: 20 GB (Mon/Tues changed files)
Wednesday: 30 GB (Mon/Tues/Wed changed files)
Thursday: 40 GB (You get the idea)
Friday: 50 GB
Saturday: 60 GB

So, you need 100+10+20+30+40+50+60 or 310 GB.

If you just did incremental backups each night (and hope you don't ever have to do a major restore, which can be ugly) you'd just need 160 GB.

Factor in some growth and figure out what you need.

Last bit of advice: Don't ever, ever, EVER be cheap or take any chances with your backups. I've seen entire companies fail when their servers crash and can't be restored. Chances are, if your server fails and you don't have a good backup you'll get fired. I've had consultant friends who have, during routine maintenance, nuked entire servers of our customers. Fortunately, we were careful about their backups so have always been able to restore them, but it's not worth the chance.

Best of luck!

- G

 

[mmx]

THANKS FOR THE ADVICE.

However, I was thinking of getting the Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/products/pr.../pvaul_110tlto2l?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

Is there somthing around the same price range that includes dual tape drives?

What brand model are you guys using?

 

[chuck2002]

Tape drives and especially tape media is very expensive when you are backing up nightly and keeping a month's worth of archives. Nevermind trying to find the model tape drive needed to access those tapes in the even of a disaster where all you have is a tape and no drive....
We are transitioning to external USB 2 drives for doing our backups. Any computer can read them, they are cheap, fast (Espeshilly doing restores) portable, reliable, compact, etc. You can configure your backup software to use software to compress the data instead of the built in compression built into most tape drives.
It is worth considering USB drives as another option anyways.