What hardware do people use to store backups on?

[Red Squirrel]

Why not just run the drives in RAID1?

Raid is not backup, unless you meant two drives in raid 1 but still have the offsite... then yeah that could work given the backup drive is in the same machine anyway.

Tapes? There's a reason you haven't heard much about tape drives in the last 5 years.

Check out tape drives at newegg... you'll see it's much cheaper to use HDDs. It's also faster, easier, and more convenient.

As pros and cons go, HDDs are all pros, no cons vs. a small home tape solution. I suppose one pro for tapes is if your tape is too small, then you can get another tape for cheaper than another hard drive, but if you only need 500 GB, then buy a 3TB hard drive "just in case" instead of a tape drive, you're still WAY ahead on cost by using the HDD.

Yep, I had looked into tapes when I was researching for a backup solution. I saw the price of tapes, about 60 bucks a pop, and was kinda turned off, but figured maybe it's not that bad since drives are 100-200 bucks. Then I saw the price of the drives. 10k for very entry level drive that fits in a cdrom bay. Yeah, hard drives are cheaper.

 

[Concillian]

Why not just run the drives in RAID1?

If a raid drive fails, there are limitations in how that partial raid array can be used, depending on how you are doing RAID. In some cases you can boot the drive, in others you cannot.


But the main thing is that I want the 3rd / external drive to be able to be bootable in the event that it becomes necessary. If lightning kills everything in my file server, I can get any new mobo and CPU, pull the external out of the enclosure, plug it in SATA and I have pretty much fully recovered. The only difference between the external drive and the internal drive is the unique partition ID. If internally it were RAID, and externally not, then the external drive would no longer be identical, and making it so easy to recover would be significantly more difficult.

I had to write a little script to backup to the external drive anyway. To make hat same script work for the internal drive required only changing the partition ID that gets mounted / unmounted. This reduces the complexity to set everything up, I mean, I had to write the other script whether internally it's RAID or not. So I can just change the ID of the partition to be mounted, save it as another name and have that script executed at 5am every day... DONE. Easier than setting up a RAID and trying to figure out how to make the external bootable and the same as the others.

In addition, I do save a miniscule amount of power by not using RAID, as I spin down the second drive after running the backup script, where in RAID 1 it is more complex to spin down one drive and not the other.

Ease of recovery is a big thing. The way I do things requires a little work up-front (which is about once every 4-5 years when I replace the 3 HDDs,) but if something ever fails, my recovery is VERY FAST and EASY. I'm willing to put in a little extra up-front for that.