Pros and Cons of tape back ups

[Ulfwald]

I need to put together a list of pros and cons of using tape backups for a small network.

List what you can come up with.


Thanks

 

[Garion]

Pro: When the server crashes and you restore it, you keep your job and your company doesn't go bankrupt.

Con: You have one more thing to check every morning.

Backups aren't one of those things that are up for discussion, believe me. If you loose your server and don't have a backup, you're dead meat. Big time. I've seen it happen and been brought in to help get it back, and it's not pretty.

- G

 

[Ulfwald]

I know backups are necessary,

Let me clarify a little more.

My boss wants to know which is better, tape backups, or backing up to a Network attached storage device, such as the Linksys network storage device. Which do you think is better> Tape, or backing up to another hdd on the hetwork.

 

[spidey07]

tape backups are completely necessary and have the following advantages over disk media.

1) archival - you store daily/weekly/monthly tapes off site incase you loose everything
2) archival and rotation
3) did I say archival?

Depending on your industry you may be required by law to maintain a certain number of years of backup.

 

[Ulfwald]

All our "required" data is at WHQ, and is backed up properly.

We are just a small region office, 7 people. All I want to do is establish a backup procedure and method so if and when my boss (a regional VP) has a hadware failure on his laptop, I can hotswap it with our home office, and restore rather quickly.

So, tapes are the best medium of choice.

 

[Soybomb]

I'm going to get beaten for this I think but if you have a small office and all your critical data is already backed up properly it might be worth looking into a hard drive based backup solution for data that you can't justify taping. Big tapes systems are expensive compared to what you can slap together a server with massive storage for. Don't use this for data you wouldn't mind loosing anyway, but if you have a small budget and the data is not must have, it could be a nice supplement, just an unreliable one.

For example if everyones important documents are already backed up in a safe manner, maybe you could mirror their workstations nightly on the lan? If the mirror server works, awesome, its a quick recovery. You don't have archives, and if a drive dies you'll need to rebuild by hand and pull the data from the WHQ.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Ulfwald
All our "required" data is at WHQ, and is backed up properly.

We are just a small region office, 7 people. All I want to do is establish a backup procedure and method so if and when my boss (a regional VP) has a hadware failure on his laptop, I can hotswap it with our home office, and restore rather quickly.

So, tapes are the best medium of choice.

For what you want to do some kind of network storage would be fine. If you get really into it there are software packages that will backup the PC automatically so if it fails you can quickly re-image it.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: Ulfwaldif and when my boss (a regional VP) has a hadware failure on his laptop, I can hotswap it with our home office, and restore rather quickly.

So, tapes are the best medium of choice.

This specific issue is not a matter of tape or hard drive.

It actually has to be two steps back up.

Assuming that his laptop has the capacity to boot form a CD-ROM.

You have to create an image of his laptop OS and software on bootable CD-ROMs.

If the laptop get trashed the system and programs can be renewed from the CD-ROMs and updates with the data files on the office server. Of course he has to make it his business to back up his recent data files on a daily bases into the office server.

However in the office you probably have to backup on tapes. It is hard to believe a business that does keep records archive for legal purposes. (Unless every thing is still done on paper).

 

[cmetz]

Ulfwald, comparing tapes to, say, using a bunch of IDE drives on a network server somewhere else:

Cost:
Pro: if you need a lot of restore points, tape is cheaper (drive is expensive, tapes themselves are cheap, if you want to hold onto two weeks' worth of tapes before rotating them around again, tapes are cheaper than that many HDs, if you don't need as many restore points, then disk is cheaper).
Con: if you don't, you can get a few IDE drives and IDE removable carriers cheaper than a tape drive and a bunch of tapes.

Compatibility:
Con: Tape drives generally require SCSI (unless they reeeeeally suck) and that's not available on just any PC, tape drives are not available on just any PC, and there are too darn many tape formats. So if you lose your backup system and have a bunch of tapes, you might still need a lot of time to get that data back, unless you buy a clone of your backup system or at least tape drive and have it in a safe location.
Pro: Random enterprise/non-low-end backup software is built to deal with tapes, and might or might not deal with hard drive solutions, but probably won't do those as well as tapes

Physical security:
Pro: it's easier to take tapes out and off-site and off-site storage places know what to do with tapes

Speed:
Con: tapes are slow. Manufacturers' performance numbers are typically >2x reality. Soooo slow. IDE disks are fairly fast, especially for linear operations like backups.

Capacity:
Con: very high capacity tapes are expensive, cheaper tapes don't hold much. Tapes hold on the order of tens of Gb these days, but hard drives hold on the order of hundreds of Gb these days.

Longevity:
Pro: My experience is mostly with 8mm and 4mm tapes, and those hold data like forever and hardly ever go bad. The same cannot be said for IDE hard drives!

There are many trade-offs, if you have any other questions, please ask specific questions. I'm a long time tape fanatic. Since 1995, every single year of my life, the hard drive in my desktop PC has died and needed replacement at least once. That's one seriously bad track record, and were it not for backup tapes, this would have gone from very bad to even worse than that.

HOWEVER, these days, I have to say that I'm using disk cloning for backups more than my tape drive. Why? Performance, and capacity. I have a 12GB DDS-3 tape drive, and a 120GB IDE hard drive. Even with a lot of compression, the drive's contents just don't fit onto that tape, PLUS it takes several hours to try (between the copy+compress, then the write to tape). The consequence of this is that I don't do backup runs as often as I should. So I got a second hard drive and set my PC up to do a filesystem sync from disk to disk (rsync is good!) a couple minutes after I boot, and thus the second disk is a warm spare. And the other issue is that when my tape drive finally dies, it's going to cost me on the order of $1k to replace - with 120GB IDE drives at less than $100 and dropping, I could get ten drives and removabale carriers for that! It's just not worth it for me to continue to invest in tape.

I think there's simply a point in terms of organizational size / backup criticality / cost sensitivity at which tapes start making sense. For low-end folks, I think a bunch of IDE drives are a better choice. For high-end folks, I think tapes remain the best choice. For the middle folks, it's all about deciding which trade-offs to make.

 

[bluegreenturtle]

Ok, so I am still trying to figure out what to do.

My company has 2 file servers with 4 17 gb drives, 4 37 gb drives, and 2 73 gb drives, all SCSI for a total of around 350gb.

We have a SCSI tape drive that does the 20/40 tapes, however, compression never seems to work (I don't know why?) so they are basically 20gb tapes.

We use NT backup that is included with NT 4 server.

Basically, somebody goes in there at the end of the day (hopefully) rotates a tape in and backs up a drive. Usually they remember to put in a second tape if it's a bigger drive.

What would you do for this situation? I can't see an option for incremental backup on NT but I haven't looked real hard (I'm not the backup person). Does that take care of it for a drivesize that big - to just backup what has changed each day? As it is now we write the whole drive to the tape.

Sorry I don't know much about backing up at all.

I have suggested building a hotswap server with IDE drives, that basically images all the SCSI drives every day, but that's just duplication, and then doing some sort of monthly total backup and taking it off site on tapes. I just don't know. I probably have less than $1000 to spend on something like that, but it could be done with the dropping IDE hd prices. We also have a DVD burner attached to a file server, but it doesn't seem good for much besides small project based backups done on a need basis.

I guess I'm asking for a system (not a mechanical system, but a way of doing things) that works and requires very little thought.