Tape drives

[Glob]

So I want to start storing a backup at least once a week off-site, and figured tape was probably the best way to do it. Online backup solutions are kind of out of the question as the backups are already at least 200GB in size.

I am wondering why DLT drives are showing up at 160/320GB? What conditions have to be met to put 320GB on a DLT tape? This is uncharted territory for me, I appreciate any assistance.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Glob
I am wondering why DLT drives are showing up at 160/320GB? What conditions have to be met to put 320GB on a DLT tape? This is uncharted territory for me, I appreciate any assistance.

They can store 160 GB of uncompressed data. The tape drives have compression tools built in, which can "optimally" fit 320 GB of data on the tape. In reality, they'll hold somewhere between 160 GB and 320 GB if you turn on the compression.

For most small businesses nowadays, I'd implement multiple 1 TB SATA hard drives in removable housings that are swapped weekly, giving one drive on-site and two or more drives off-site at any given time. I prefer to dedicate another drive to making periodic "long-term archive" backups, holding only periodic data and email stores from the past year or so.

I, like most small-business IT consultants nowadays, prefer hard drives over tape because tape drives are pretty pricey, because hard drives have much more storage space, and because you can read your data anywhere. Tape cassettes are pretty reliable, but tape drives are not as reliable. If the tape drive breaks or is stolen, you have to locate another drive before you can read your data or make backups again. I run into MANY broken tape drives that never get replaced.

 

[Glob]

Thanks, good input. It seems cheaper to buy a removable SATA bay and do it that way with a few drives after all. Do you use ntbackup, or a 3rd party solution? My 2 concerns are over 200GB of irreplaceable data, and AD users/groups.

 

[superunknown98]

If you must use hard drives, maybe a SSD of would be better. I would worry about the mechanical longevity of a disk based drive. If you drop the off site drive, will the motor or arm be damaged? I know the chances of a disk based drive going bad are fairly small, especialy when new, but the whole philosophy of backing up data is that shit does and will go wrong. The backup is there to cover your ass when it does, why take the risk?

I have a AIT5 Sony library, Each tape holds 400GB uncompressed and 1TB compressed. Sometimes I do feel the need for something bigger, but I can always use more tapes if I run out of room. It is expensive though.

Maybe you could backup to a NAS or SAN first and then to a removable disk?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: superunknown98
If you must use hard drives, maybe a SSD of would be better. I would worry about the mechanical longevity of a disk based drive.

Current SSDs won't work for backup because they see WAY too many write cycles when used for full backups of servers. Plus, there are no 200 GB SSD drives.

Originally posted by: superunknown98
If you drop the off site drive, will the motor or arm be damaged?

Since you verify each backup, you'll get an immediate message if a hard drive is damaged. Hard drives mounted in carriers and held in padded cases for transport have been VERY reliable in my experience. I've got many of them at many clients and have only had one with a small sector error. These are replaced immediately

Since you'll want at least three backup drives and they are kept at two locations, the odds of all of them failing simultaenously are tiny. I've seen a lot of bad tapes and bad tape drives and bad tape backups, too. In fact, many times more than I've seen with hard drives.

No matter what media or hardware is used, backups should be monitored constantly and their quality tested at least monthly. They can all fail and they do. Tapes and hard drives both have their place in backups, but for small businesses, hard drives work well, have adequate reliability, and are much easier to diagnose when backup errors occur.

 

[Glob]

Hey guys, one more question. Are there any active SATA backplanes which will allow me to use the same drive letter for several HDDs, or how do you handle that otherwise with a scheduled backup job?

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Glob
Hey guys, one more question. Are there any active SATA backplanes which will allow me to use the same drive letter for several HDDs, or how do you handle that otherwise with a scheduled backup job?

I don't understand your question. What are you trying to do?

If you mean you want several backup drives to show up as the same drive letter, this is simple in Windows. You go into Disk Management, insert the backup drives one at a time, and change all of them to the same drive letter. Just don't try to insert both of them in the same PC at once, which will likely cause all but one to disappear.

When you insert one of them into Windows, it'll show up as the required drive letter. This works with eSATA, USB, and Flash drives.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Glob
Hey guys, one more question. Are there any active SATA backplanes which will allow me to use the same drive letter for several HDDs, or how do you handle that otherwise with a scheduled backup job?

link

 

[RebateMonger]

This is what I've been using for three years for backing up servers:

Hot-swap internal SATA tray

I use a Silicon Image-based SATA controller card (either PCI or PCI-E, depending on the server). I buy at least three hard drives, at least three drive housings, and padded cases ($10 at Granite Digital and they are the perfect size for backup drives in a housing) for all the drives.

I've had zero problems with these so far.

Note that Silicon Image SATA controllers do NOT provide a "safely remove this drive" option. And I wouldn't use it anyway, since we don't want clients logging into their servers to disconnect the SATA drives. As long as the servers aren't in the middle of a backup job, we just have the client pull the drive when it's time to swap it out. Backups are all verfied and tested monthly to ensure there's no file corruption.

 

[schenley101]

Get a TAPE DRIVE. There is a reason that it is industry standard!!!! external harddrives have a knack for falling or breaking and are not good for longterm storage. also if you are doing a sequential read, tapes are actually faster thus your back up and running in less time. I cannot stress how important tape backup is. where a work they tried to be cheap and back up to hd's. The firebox holding them fell and a couple were broken. if our servers had of gone down, we would have been SOL...

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: schenley101
The firebox holding them fell and a couple were broken. if our servers had of gone down, we would have been SOL...

I wouldn't recommend storing anything but the current backup tapes or disks on-site. I know of one company that kept their tapes on-site. A burglar took all their servers, all their tapes, and their tape drive.

 

[Emulex]

what you do is setup a cheap boxen and use usb/esata/whatever over NETWORK to that machine and pull the files down.

because some day that drive you carry home/to the safety deposit box will fail and it windows has a way of going nutz requiring a reboot when it does.

i have an old workstation with dual gigabit; 4 BLACK WD 1TB; (does print and SEPM too); backs up every pc every night bare metal FULL image and a couple of servers and itself(server portion). this gets offloaded to a 1/ 2TB drive weekly. the core data is offloaded nightly of course but i've had folks drop a drive on the way home (???) and well lets just say they would die half way through their job.

separating the machine that does the usb/esata writes by network allows you do not reboot the machine receiving the images and or you could separate them by location as well.