Tape backup woes....what else is out there? Help!

edmicman

Golden Member
May 30, 2001
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We have/had a VXA-1e SCSI tape backup drive for a couple years now. About a month ago it broke, and we had to RMA it. Nevermind the whole RMA process taking almost a month to get us a replacement drive, then having that drive being DOA, and now waiting on an expidited RMA of THAT drive....we're starting to look at other solutions. We're thinking of picking up a used VXA-1 drive from ebay, but also looking into some other alternatives. This is where I'd like some help or advice. We have maybe 60 gigs total that is fully backed up each weekend, and then a differential backup that is run each other night. We're backing up two Win2k server systems and a SQL2000 database, and using Veritas' BackupExec as the software. What other backup alternatives are out there that might fit?

We're looking into these online backup services, which seems good, and signed up for a 1 month trial with one service. The problem is that the initial full backup is/would take forever. Like I said we have probably 60gigs of info to start with, and even with a fractional T1 we're not getting a great amount of upload speed to this company's servers; its not looking like we'll even get the whole thing upped within the month. It seems like a good enough plan to do differential backups online if there was a way to get them all of the base data faster.

We're still a fairly small company, so we can't really plunk down a couple grand on a large complex tape robotic system, etc. We really just want a basic drive that we can manually swap tapes each morning and have it do its thing. This whole ordeal with Exabyte/VXA and their RMA services has totally disgusted me, though, and I really don't want to support them any more by buying their products. What else is there in the lower/mid range tape backup solutions? Or is there something else we might look at? Thanks for any help!
 

Fatalist

Member
Nov 25, 2001
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Have you thought about using big, cheap hard drives in removeable cages?
You could get 4 60 GB backups on a 250 GB drive.
 

edmicman

Golden Member
May 30, 2001
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That has crossed my mind....maybe I'll mention it to my boss. Isn't there more risk involved with moving around removeable hard drives than with tape, though? Do you have any links or more info on a setup using removable harddrives as a backup solution?
 

zephyrprime

Diamond Member
Feb 18, 2001
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I would use a disk backup for daily backup and use a tape for weekly backup. You might need a weeks worth of HD's which can cost quite a bit of money. I guess it's cheaper to just use a new tape drive. You're lucky that your storage needs at 60Gb are so modest. Even my household backup needs are greater than that.

Frational T1 is pretty slow. Business DSL or business cable solutions might be faster.

Keep in mind that you may also want to use offsite backup also in case your building burns to the ground.
 

edmicman

Golden Member
May 30, 2001
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Right, we currently swap tapes each morning and take the unused ones offsite until needed. We used to have a business cable modem service, but we run a web server and the service became horribly spotty; we would just lose the internet connection for no apparent reason. So we went with the T1. It meets our needs and offers much more reliability. I'll look into the hard drive backup solutions.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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If you're really looking to solve your backup issues for the long term, I'd strongly consider looking at a full-blown NAS solution (won't be cheap, but will solve your problems, and will scale when you need more storage). However, if all you want is cheap occasional backups for a single server, I think either finding a new tape drive, or using external hard drive backups are your best bet. Unless you're cranking out 60GB of data a day, you could certainly do a weekly full backup and seven days worth of incremental ones on a 200GB hard disk (cost: roughly $100, plus another $50-100 for the enclosure). You could maintain a month's worth of daily backups with, say, four or five of these (total cost: under $1K). Just about any backup software should be able to work with them; as far as the software is concerned, it's like backing up onto a second hard drive in the system. I'm not real familiar with low-end tape systems nowadays, unfortunately. The last one I used extensively was one of those huge robotic tape arrays.

Isn't there more risk involved with moving around removeable hard drives than with tape, though?

As long as you're not dropping the disks on the floor repeatedly, I don't think there are any more reliability issues with hard drive backups than with tapes (at least in the short term; if you need to store data for a long time, tapes are probably better, as a hard disk's rate of failure increases noticeably with each year of age). If you're paranoid, you could use two external drives and have your server back up onto both of them, in case one disk craps out on you. This is where a NAS solution really shines; the better ones can do real-time mirroring, journaling, and take snapshot backups while the system is online and running.