Tape drive vs an extra HD or two

[Garet Jax]

Hello all,

I am looking to upgrade my storage capacity and want to ensure I have backup capabilities to go along with it.

As I look into it, it is becoming more and more apparent that purchasing an extra HD or two or even three is far cheaper than buying a big enough tape drive .

As an example, newegg has this tape drive for $300 and it only stores 40GB.

In comparison I could buy 3 of these hard drives for $110 each that store 1TB. Add in an appropriate enclosure for ~$50 and I have a pretty good backup solution.

Am I missing something?
Why are tape drives so much more expensive?

Thanks.

 

[Denithor]

Never understood the high cost for tapes myself.

How much stuff do you actually back up? Whole system or just a few files? I normally just back up my photos/music/etc onto a few DVDs once in a while. Waaay cheaper than either tapes or external hdd as long as you don't have too much to back up.

 

[Slugbait]

Couple of reasons why tape is more expensive:
- designed for IT
- undesired by the general population

So, the market isn't flooded with them, which would reduce prices.

This particular product actually supports up to 160 gigs, not 40...you're just getting an included 40G cartridge with your purchase. You supply the additional storage as needed. That's not cheap, either...

BTW, it's not a tape drive. The cartridges contain conventional 2.5" hard drives.

For backup purposes, it would be better to skip DIY and get something like a Western Digital My Book Essential 750GB External Hard Drive for $100 shipped.

 

[JackMDS]

Tapes are good only for straight backup.

They cannot be used for regular storage since they save and retrieve in serial manner.

They have certain advantage for repeating back up since when reused you do not have to erase before using. It self earring when recording over and over.

I.e. When use for daily total backup you keep few tapes, you plug in a tape at the end of the day while keeping the tapes from previous days intact, and keep rotating them in this manner.

I use a similar concept with few regular SATA drives using this type of device.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16817998020

 

[RebateMonger]

As JackMDS notes, rotation of removable SATA drives for backups has proven very useful. I've been using them in businesses for about three years now. Their capacity (up to 1.5 TB) is a godsend when you have large arrays or want to keep multiple backups on the same drive. I use trays that fully enclose the drives and provide padded cases for the trays because my clients need to transport the drives off-site.

Tape drives, especially those with enough capacity to handle growing server data stores or with tape changers, are pretty pricey. It all depends on how much money you can spend for backups.

No matter what backup system you choose, be sure to periodically (once a month is good) test the backups to be sure you can actually restore data from them. You wouldn't believe how many companies have unusable backups because they are never tested.

 

[corkyg]

All of the above, plus . . . tape drive restorations are clumsy and slow. Bottom line - tape is yesterday's news. Go for a duplicate HDD that is ready to go and reguires no restoration - just move the power cable or a mobile rack for drive replacement.

 

[nineball9]

I agree with most of the responses; tape has seen its day for the most part. However, if you want to include disaster recovery as part of a backup plan, tapes or removable drives are necessary. An alternative are online storage companies, but these have the potential disadvantages of the online company going under or losing/corrupting/hacking your data and the costs can add up quickly.

I've read many posts, both here on AnandTech and elsewhere, where people have agonized over the loss of years of family photos, downloaded music etc. Should your home burn down, get burglarized/vandalized, the upstairs pipes burst, drives become virus infected, your SO (or the police) takes your entire system and backups, etc, your backups will likely be useless or nonexistent (think of computer owners in New Orleans after Katrina.) So if you do have valuable data - family photos etc - think about offsite storage like a bank safe deposit box.

Tapes tend to be a bit more durable then hard drives for rotating archival/disaster recovery media. Burnable DVD's or CD's are hit-or-miss in terms of longevity. Finally, be aware that technology changes. E.G., old (now defunct) ISA tape drives and hard drives, which would have been backups/disaster recovery strategies in the past, would be pretty much useless with today's hardware and operating systems. Personally, I don't keep anything I can't afford to lose on computer media.

For simple backups (and depending on your budget), an imaging product like Acronis True Image or similar with an external drive will work pretty well. Unless your home is destroyed!

 

[Slugbait]

Guys...there's a lot of talk about physical tape, and much of what you're saying doesn't apply to OP's particular product.

BTW, it's not a tape drive. The cartridges contain conventional 2.5" hard drives.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
Guys...there's a lot of talk about physical tape, and much of what you're saying doesn't apply to OP's particular product.

Because the OP specifically asked about tapes. And because other folks can get upset if you don't at least mention tape drives for backups.

As noted, hard drives, tapes, online backups, flash drives, CD/DVD, and backup servers all have their places in protecting data. The best choice depends on how much data, how critical downtime is, how much you are willing to pay, and how much risk is acceptable.

My "perfect backup" would include remote (Internet) copies of critical data (in case the whole town gets wiped out), rotating offsite full system backups, and onsite connected backups that are updated as appropriate.

 

[Garet Jax]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
Guys...there's a lot of talk about physical tape, and much of what you're saying doesn't apply to OP's particular product.

BTW, it's not a tape drive. The cartridges contain conventional 2.5" hard drives.

Slugbait - thank's for focusing. The original product I linked was supposed to have been a tape drive. I really did want to compare and contrast tapes and extra HDs for backup.

 

[Paperdoc]

RebateMonger said,

"No matter what backup system you choose, be sure to periodically (once a month is good) test the backups to be sure you can actually restore data from them. You wouldn't believe how many companies have unusable backups because they are never tested. "

I want to echo that strongly. First time I saw this personally was back in the late 60's at a university computer mainframe center. A junior system programmer ran a really poor utility that wiped out all the hard drives on a Friday afternoon and they had to restore from tapes, which they certainly had. So they mounted them and ran the restore, but it could not read the tapes! There was an error in the backup writing utility that had been supplied as part of the operating system. After some brainstorming about what hypothetically might be the problem, and how could they read the tapes anyway, they agreed on a short list. Another much brighter junior programmer whipped out a machine code routine for tape reading and with fantastic luck the first attempt worked! So they spent the weekend restoring the system.

The most amazing part to all was that the operating system had been distributed nearly 7 months earlier, presumably to many computer mainframe centers, and NOBODY had ever reported this tape glitch! So how many centers had useless backups?

By the way, "test the backup" should not mean simply running a utility to verify the data copy, nor is it sufficient to "restore" everything to a destination drive and make sure the operation does not end with errors. You really need to run the system from the restored copy and try out as many critical operations as you can. A backup set that is missing some obscure files can still be a huge pain!

 

[StinkyPinky]

Originally posted by: Garet Jax
Hello all,

I am looking to upgrade my storage capacity and want to ensure I have backup capabilities to go along with it.

As I look into it, it is becoming more and more apparent that purchasing an extra HD or two or even three is far cheaper than buying a big enough tape drive .

As an example, newegg has this tape drive for $300 and it only stores 40GB.

In comparison I could buy 3 of these hard drives for $110 each that store 1TB. Add in an appropriate enclosure for ~$50 and I have a pretty good backup solution.

Am I missing something?
Why are tape drives so much more expensive?

Thanks.

If you just want to backup your personal PC, an external hard drive is good enough. I've got a 640 gig one that does the job for me. I used Acronis to make an image of my entire pc (about 280 gigs). But in case that fails, I still manually backed up my important files (documents, pictures etc). Plus I also did a second backup of my critical files to a 4 gig usb stick.