Tape backup, mirrored drives? Offsite storage? backup solutions

[JCROCCO]

Still looking for the best onsite/offsite backup storage solutions to handle the 3 major things:

- fire
- data corruption
- HD failure

Is there any one solution that can protect against all 3, or whats the best conbination of?

Also, Is a SCSI tape drive any better than an IDE tape drive? Some documentation from manufactures with both show the same transfer rates for similar products but one being SCSI and one being IDE.

 

[EeyoreX]

Still looking for the best onsite/offsite backup storage solutions to handle the 3 major things:

- fire

Obviously offsite storage is the way to go here. That or a fire-proof safe. My personal opinion is that no true backup solution is complete unless there is an offsite backup available.

- data corruption
- HD failure

You can do tape back-up, hard drive imaging, NAS box or whatever. I suppose it depends on your budget and capacity needs.

\Dan

 

[Matthias99]

One important distinction to keep in mind for protection from data corruption is that you need backups spaced far enough apart (or enough of them) that when you notice the corrupted data (which could be weeks or even months later), you have a clean backup of the file in question at some point in the past.

A simple RAID5 configuration protects against disk failure (unless you're extraordinarily unlucky and two disks fail at once), but offers no protection against corruption. For real safety, you want to have redundant hardware RAID (catches disk failures), regular onsite backups, and occasional offsite backups. A fair level of security would be something like weekly backups stored on tape, and maybe a full offsite backup every few months. In a moderately paranoid environment, you might keep daily backups for a week on hand, and weekly backups for a year offsite. Extremely paranoid would be something like hourly snapshots combined with daily tape backups archived for several years offsite, but that requires a significant hardware investment, especially if you have a lot of data to protect.