Originally posted by: Kilrsat
Originally posted by: SickBeast
Originally posted by: desy
Now that its all sorted out

Mirror your 18 gig drives, good idea
Add your 72 gig scsi drive 10K for $365 CDN at Tiger direct, you don't need 15K you said it was for archival purposes. Work out your backup solution, even a tape drive will be pretty expensive once in and with a rotation of tapes. What was the quote from the ISP for offsite? combine that with maybe your USB IDE drive ext your probably good.
If you ever gone through the ITIL process, availablity and continuity aren't something to sluff off.
Its a real cost from the buisiness point of view and easily eclipses HW in the bottom line.
Would you go with a single 74GB SCSI, or two IDE 250GB drives in RAID-1? Performance is not an issue, reliability only.
We have a 20GB tape backup system. It's a PITA and I was hoping to only use it on the 18GB RAID-1 of critical data. We have 36GB of data in total right now (both hard drives are 99% full). RAID-1 is a backup in itself in some ways. The USB drive is the second backup. Remote off-site storage is the third. I don't think we need anything more than that. An optical backup onto DVD-R every month wouldn't hurt.
RAID is not a backup!! This is a very important thing to understand. It is protection against hardware failure, but it is not a backup. A virus gets into one drive, the other is wasted too. A user overwrites the wrong file? That file is gone.
If the data is really worth $200,000/week, I'd look into a real backup solution that can provide a history. One of the most frequent conversations I've had regarding restoring from a backup:
User: "Can you restore file ABC?"
Me: "Sure"
I go and restore the file, fire off an email to the user
User: "Sorry, that copy isn't the one I need."
Me: "Ok, when was the last day you remember using the version you want?"
User: "Oh, it must have been a few months ago"
Now, with RAID that file is gone, with your USB solution that file is most likely gone. DVD-R has capacity limitations and hasn't passed long term reliability, especially with some discs being difficult to read as little as a year later.
A modern LTO, LTO2, or SDLT tape system would be a very nice companion no matter what drive solution you go with. All of these provide at least 100GB (native, double for the "compressed" figures) per tape, and the costs per tape in the $40-$60 range. These are proven technologies that give you more reliability and flexibility in your backup solutions. You can archive nightly, weekly, bi-monthly, etc. and be able to pull up a copy of a file from multiple points in the past. I'll grant that my archive experience is centered around large (2-5TB) data systems, but anything as valuable as that data cannot be trusted to a single backup.
I'd also like to stress the importance to verifying and testing your backups! A backup is no good if it doesn't work or you don't know how to use it. You should also have a disaster recovery plan on file and make sure every IT related person is aware of it. Planning for the "just in case" situation is very important, because if you run into a situation without a plan your emotions are running high, you're thinking on the fly, and you may end up doing more damage. A plan that is thought out in advance, using a clear head, and that passes a peer review may just save your rear.