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Tape Backup solution

I had dat once.. it seems flimsy.. if its 10gb max w/o growth, I like dlt 40/80 (40 native, 80 compressed).

Theres atl/lto option as well.

I have not seen a usb tape drive before.. all the high end tape uses scsi. You will need a scsi card. Are you looking for internal or external ?
 
Why would you bother with tape when hard drives are so much less expensive? You can get well over 100 GB drive for under $100 US and put it in an external enclosure that takes ATA drives and connects through a USB port.

If you partitioned the drive into 10 GB partitions, you'd have room for plenty of sequential or partial backups, and you could access any file randomly at any time, and hard drives are much faster than any tape system.

If you wanted a really secure backup, you could use another drive and Norton Ghost (or another product) that clones your drive. If the main drive is attacked by a virus or anything else that corrupts it, you can reformat and restore your working setup. If it totally fails, the cloned backup plugs right in and works like the original. In either case, you're as safe as your last Ghosted copy, and you can restore later files from the other backup drive.

Once you've backed up your setup, disconnect the backup drive. No one has ever written a virus that can jump the air gap to a disconnected drive. 🙂
 
thing is I want to be able to have say 2 copies.
1 onsite
1 offsite
and just slip it into my pocket as i go home.

Hard drive isnt as practical.
 
I used sata hdds in mobile racks. You can switch and backup and replace. You can clone or whatever. You got so many choices because hdds and the mobile racks are so cheap, why shouldn't you be doing this in the first place?

I hear the horror stories of lost files and whatever. For around $80 bucks, you're on your way to Utopia.
80GB for < $50
2 mobile SATA mobile racks for $27.90
Now I ask you, which way is better?
 
Originally posted by: khizrs
thing is I want to be able to have say 2 copies.
1 onsite
1 offsite
and just slip it into my pocket as i go home.

Hard drive isnt as practical.
Click to expand...
Sure it is. Here's an example of an external case for 2.5" drives that looks like it would fit into your pocket or a briefcase. The site doesn't give dimensions, but you can get the idea, and it accomodates drives up to 80 GB.

You can also get mobile racks for 2.5" drives. The difference is mainly that you could then plug the tray directly into the system, instead of going through a USB port. Here's one where the frame mounts into a 3.5" (floppy drive) bay. The plug in rack is probably about as easy to pocket as the external case.

These are just examples. You'll have to scout out what's available in your area, but if you can find the right combo, it's got to be better and cheaper than tapes. 🙂
 
DAT72, on a SCSI interface, is reliable and not horribly expensive. Assuming you have some sort of server, I'd just back up the entire server to the tape, so you can quickly restore the system in case of diaster.

As stated, removable SATA or USB hard drives can work well too. People who have lots of data (100GB or more) often find that tape becomes too slow and too expensive for many small businesses.
 
Hard drives are even more practical! For that amount of data you could use an external 2.5" drive - as many as you like, and carry them anywhere. They are faster to clone and require no RESTORE. That is tape's weakness - you have to waste a lot of time restoring the data, where with duplicate HDDs it is simply plug and play.

I have three "reserve" hard drives for each of my computers. The cost of all 6 drives is less than a tape system with tapes.
 
If its a company, ie like mine. sec requires 5 year retention.. my 40 buck sdlt holds 320gb with shelf life of 30 years..

thats why theres money in the tape market.

You can buy 100 hdds or 100 tapes thats eaiser to store. Most tape can be dropped w/o damage, hard drive can't always survive a drop
 
Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
If its a company, ie like mine. sec requires 5 year retention.. my 40 buck sdlt holds 320gb with shelf life of 30 years..

thats why theres money in the tape market.

You can buy 100 hdds or 100 tapes thats eaiser to store. Most tape can be dropped w/o damage, hard drive can't always survive a drop
Click to expand...

QFT. I still use DLT to back up my stuff. These tapes can literally be thrown off a building onto cement and the data can still be retrieved easily. Cant do that with a HD.
 
Also hd weights more..

avg hd weigths about 1.25 pounds, 20 ounce..

avg dlt tape is 7.85 oz.. 3 tape is almost 1 hdd

I rather move and carry 10,000 tapes not 10,000 hdd..
 
By the time you find the 1 tape in 10,000 you need to restore a server, a simple drive swap via a mobile rack would have the server back up in less than 5 minutes. 🙂
 
ive been looking at tape drives myself, and still need to do alot more research. Seems there are many different formats for the media.

most importantly, why is tape drive hardware so expensive, considering the amount of space it will read/write natively? like a 40gb tape drive can cost $400, why?
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
By the time you find the 1 tape in 10,000 you need to restore a server, a simple drive swap via a mobile rack would have the server back up in less than 5 minutes. 🙂
Click to expand...


Tape system use laser barcode, retrival is less than 1 minute.. of course, this isn't your typical home tape backup systems.

Assuming you need to retain daily backup on HDD also.. searching through 10,000 hdd is the same..
 
Originally posted by: nervegrind3r
ive been looking at tape drives myself, and still need to do alot more research. Seems there are many different formats for the media.

most importantly, why is tape drive hardware so expensive, considering the amount of space it will read/write natively? like a 40gb tape drive can cost $400, why?
Click to expand...

Because tapedrives (like DLT) are extremely reliable. Like I posted before, you would have to nuke DLT to destroy it 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Oyeve
Originally posted by: nervegrind3r
ive been looking at tape drives myself, and still need to do alot more research. Seems there are many different formats for the media.

most importantly, why is tape drive hardware so expensive, considering the amount of space it will read/write natively? like a 40gb tape drive can cost $400, why?
Click to expand...

Because tapedrives (like DLT) are extremely reliable. Like I posted before, you would have to nuke DLT to destroy it 🙂
Click to expand...

Well, I think napalm works too.. ahha.. the only thing i never try was how water proof is it.. Oyeve you got any ideas ?
 
If all you have is 10 gigs of data, a DDS4 drive should work just as well (20/40 capacity) and will be a bit cheaper. The one I got from eBay a few years back cost all of $100 or so, though I can understand that you might want to order new for business purposes.

The DAT 72i you linked would work too, but I don't see any compelling reason to spend the extra money unless you expecting a lot of data growth.
 
Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
Because tapedrives (like DLT) are extremely reliable. Like I posted before, you would have to nuke DLT to destroy it 🙂
Click to expand...

Well, I think napalm works too.. ahha.. the only thing i never try was how water proof is it.. Oyeve you got any ideas ?[/quote]

I even tried puting a tape in water a few years ago. Opened it up and let it dry for a few days and yes, the data was completely intact. I wouldnt recommend any DAT system as they are fragile and unreliable in my experiance.
 
Originally posted by: Oyeve
I even tried puting a tape in water a few years ago. Opened it up and let it dry for a few days and yes, the data was completely intact. I wouldnt recommend any DAT system as they are fragile and unreliable in my experiance.
Click to expand...

Cool.. I used dat3 once before... sold it after a week... its very flimsy... didn't like at all..
 
Tape system use laser barcode, retrival is less than 1 minute.. of course, this isn't your typical home tape backup systems.
Click to expand...

What Sci-fi movie is that from?

I've used pretty extensive tape back-ups system for over 10 large companies, and I'll take a rack of inexpensive IDE drives any day.

Boy, lets count the things going against tape:

- High failure rates with tape-back units. They are by far one of the most unreliable devices made, and I've filled more than a few dumpsters with broken tapes (DLT) that have wound up in side the unit. Yeah...they "never break". (stroking motion with hand)

- If your tape back-up software database gets trashed, you're screwed. So now, you need the server OS, AND tape back-up software to restore a single file. Yeah.....right.

- Tapes DO fail without warning. I've lost a few dozen DLT and DATs to the data headers getting trashed with no warning. All of a sudden no back-up unit can read them, and it's game over.

- While tapes that conform to a format standard should be able to be read from different units, the reality is not so rosey. Anytime the hardware that wrote the tapes gets replaced, you take a serious chance on all your data being rendered inert do to mechanical mis-alignment of the heads, etc. Data on a hard drive however can easily be read by different machines, I/O cards, chipsets, operating systems, etc.
 
All software are similar.. its how you want to backup.

Do you want to backup open files ? do you have exchange server or sql database ?
 
it would be ideal to backup the lot.
We do not have an exchange server or database, we do however have misc word/excel etc files and Sage (like quickbooks) data.
 
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