Discussion
Can someone recomend a good tape backup system? I would like it to work with mac and pc, but it does not have to do automatic stuff. I just want it to keep old stuff that I don't use any more, but may need at some point in the future, although that is unlikely. I know nothing about tapes!
I've used IOmega Rev drives in place of tapes a couple of times now, they've been quite good. Either that or you could use DVDR's, they can be a little bit fragile though. Writers are less than 30 squid now. Secret option three is just get an external hard disk, shouldnt cost more than £100 for quite a decent capacity one.
How much data do you need to store?
How much data do you need to store?
I'd also suggest an EHDD (External Hard Disk Drive). You can buy one with a couple of hundred gig of space for £100 or so. Alternatively, buy an EHDD case which is compatible with PATA and SATAI/II (such as sold by IcyBox) and then buy a Seagate HDD with a 5yr warranty and chuck it in there. The best bit is, when the 1TB SATA HDDs are released in the next 6 months or so you can use one of them in your case if you wish (or wait until they get cheaper).
Personally I don't think tape drives offer great value for money any more.
Personally I don't think tape drives offer great value for money any more.
aldi said:
How much data do you need to store?
Therein lies the question! I sell software that backs up Mac and Windows (amongst others) - which starts at around £800 (already heavily discounted for Mac users, so no mate's rates!).
Otherwise, for professional use, you could try either EMC Dantz Retrospect (rubbish) or Symantec/Veritas Backup Exec (better software, but not great on Mac and questionable future support). Also Bakbone Netvault in the market (our biggest competitor).
roadsweeper said:
I'd also suggest an EHDD (External Hard Disk Drive). You can buy one with a couple of hundred gig of space for £100 or so. Alternatively, buy an EHDD case which is compatible with PATA and SATAI/II (such as sold by IcyBox) and then buy a Seagate HDD with a 5yr warranty and chuck it in there. The best bit is, when the 1TB SATA HDDs are released in the next 6 months or so you can use one of them in your case if you wish (or wait until they get cheaper).
Personally I don't think tape drives offer great value for money any more.
Personally I don't think tape drives offer great value for money any more.
I want something that I can easily take off site (sorry, didn't mention this at first) without having to cart around an HDD. At the moment I have a 2TB drive running RAID 5, so I am quite secure here, and we also use DVDs to to backups of any new work that comes in. But I want something that I can remove from the site, delete off my HDD here, and be confident that it will work in 2 years if I need to access it. I am not confident that DVDs will do this, plus, even double layered ones are small enough that it is a serious pain to have to burn a load of them.
Unless there is a good reason to use tape, I'd avoid it. From what I've seen, it is an extremely expensive solution, and it is slow and limited in capacity (and as often as not in the commercial environment, it doesn't even bloody work when you want to restore a backup, because Mr Spoons, the overnight op, has forgotton to swap the tape cartidges for the last three weeks). I'd use cheap and cheerful external drives for routine back-ups (i.e. data that changes frequently) and I'd burn critical stuff to DVD. External drives can easily go in a brief case, giving you a huge off-site back-up capacity for a few hundred quid. It really is hard to beat.
Editted to add ...
Have just read your second post ... tape capcity the last time I looked was pretty pathetic. The tapes are also pretty bulky. Physical data density was certainly much higher with HDD the last time I looked, but that was a couple of years ago. I have no idea how long tape data is stable for. Certainly not confident I'd want to leave a HDD on a shelf for three years and then switch it on either.
Editted to add ...
Have just read your second post ... tape capcity the last time I looked was pretty pathetic. The tapes are also pretty bulky. Physical data density was certainly much higher with HDD the last time I looked, but that was a couple of years ago. I have no idea how long tape data is stable for. Certainly not confident I'd want to leave a HDD on a shelf for three years and then switch it on either.
Edited by ATG on Tuesday 25th July 15:13
Hmm, time for a rethink!
I see that I can get a 500gb external drive for £175, and a tape drive costs £200! SO I guess the best solution is to just fill up the external drive and take it offsite. then buy another one in year or so when I want to do the same, by which tim eit will be much cheaper anyway.
Thanks!
I see that I can get a 500gb external drive for £175, and a tape drive costs £200! SO I guess the best solution is to just fill up the external drive and take it offsite. then buy another one in year or so when I want to do the same, by which tim eit will be much cheaper anyway.
Thanks!
If you're intending to keep your backup media for years without using it, can I suggest you do a quarterly integrity check? As I mentioned, the Seagate HDDs are guranateed for 5yrs so should be OK, but it's best to check them every now and again to make sure you don't get a shock if you need them.
Also, if you buya separate case and HDD it will cost less because you can simply remove the HDD, store it and put a new HDD in the same case. That's why a PATA/SATA I & II case such as the IcyBox is ideal - it's designed for swapping HDDs easily, it can take cheaper IDE/PATA HDDs and it's pretty 'future proof' as it can take the larger and more reliable SATA HDDs if you wish.
Also, if you buya separate case and HDD it will cost less because you can simply remove the HDD, store it and put a new HDD in the same case. That's why a PATA/SATA I & II case such as the IcyBox is ideal - it's designed for swapping HDDs easily, it can take cheaper IDE/PATA HDDs and it's pretty 'future proof' as it can take the larger and more reliable SATA HDDs if you wish.
roadsweeper said:
If you're intending to keep your backup media for years without using it, can I suggest you do a quarterly integrity check? As I mentioned, the Seagate HDDs are guranateed for 5yrs so should be OK, but it's best to check them every now and again to make sure you don't get a shock if you need them.
OK, this is a key point. I will be deleting the originals, so what is on the HDD/Tape will be the only copy of it in existence. Hence I do not want to get a "Nasty Shock" when I come to use it. Rethink MKII?
dcw@pr said:
roadsweeper said:
If you're intending to keep your backup media for years without using it, can I suggest you do a quarterly integrity check? As I mentioned, the Seagate HDDs are guranateed for 5yrs so should be OK, but it's best to check them every now and again to make sure you don't get a shock if you need them.
OK, this is a key point. I will be deleting the originals, so what is on the HDD/Tape will be the only copy of it in existence. Hence I do not want to get a "Nasty Shock" when I come to use it. Rethink MKII?
If you will rely on this data at a later date, you must have a bare minimum of 2 copies!
I'd never rely on a single copy, especially using HDD. They are flexible, fast and cheap ... but they are potentially flakey. Being a little pesimmistic you could probably expect any given HDD to go kaput once in three years, which is sort of equivalent to a 1/1000 chance of the disc packing up on any given day. Use two discs and the chance of both failing simultaneously becomes 1/1,000,000 or 1 day in 300 years, which feels rather better to me. I'd probably go for a three disc solution; one gets brought into the office to pick up new data, then it goes off-site where it gets replicated to two other discs which spend their life diffing each other every day to check they are still working.
puggit said:
dcw@pr said:
roadsweeper said:
If you're intending to keep your backup media for years without using it, can I suggest you do a quarterly integrity check? As I mentioned, the Seagate HDDs are guranateed for 5yrs so should be OK, but it's best to check them every now and again to make sure you don't get a shock if you need them.
OK, this is a key point. I will be deleting the originals, so what is on the HDD/Tape will be the only copy of it in existence. Hence I do not want to get a "Nasty Shock" when I come to use it. Rethink MKII?
If you will rely on this data at a later date, you must have a bare minimum of 2 copies!
time for further explanation on my part - here is an example of a typical scenario
1) Someone comes back from a job with 4GB of photos
2) This is burnt on to a DVD in its original state, then copied onto the RAID 5 array
3) DVD taken off site
4) The photos are edited (obviosuly on HDD)
5) Client chooses more photos to be edited/printed whatever, again, done on HDD. This is normally done within a year
6) HDD starts to fill up...
It is at this point that I would like to move the photos off the HDD. It is unlikely that they will be needed again - we have already supplied everything to the client that they need. The original DVDs are still around, but they do not contain the edited files, and are unreliable (IMO). There would not really be a problem in just deleting the old files off my computer, and forgetting about them, but this seems a bit short sighted - I think it is always best to have them lying around somewhere. Therefore, I was originally thinking that tapes would fit this scenario best....??????
For the purposes of archiving as per your requirements, what I would suggest is maybe taking a full backup on tape once every fortnight - and then deleting the data after 6 or 8 weeks.
This way you would have 3 or 4 copies of each dataset on tape - for redundancy.
It would be fairly easy to do this manually with any backup product, or some do it automatically
This way you would have 3 or 4 copies of each dataset on tape - for redundancy.
It would be fairly easy to do this manually with any backup product, or some do it automatically
ATG said:
Unless there is a good reason to use tape, I'd avoid it. From what I've seen, it is an extremely expensive solution, and it is slow and limited in capacity (and as often as not in the commercial environment, it doesn't even bloody work when you want to restore a backup, because Mr Spoons, the overnight op, has forgotton to swap the tape cartidges for the last three weeks). I'd use cheap and cheerful external drives for routine back-ups (i.e. data that changes frequently) and I'd burn critical stuff to DVD. External drives can easily go in a brief case, giving you a huge off-site back-up capacity for a few hundred quid. It really is hard to beat.
Editted to add ...
Have just read your second post ... tape capcity the last time I looked was pretty pathetic. The tapes are also pretty bulky. Physical data density was certainly much higher with HDD the last time I looked, but that was a couple of years ago. I have no idea how long tape data is stable for. Certainly not confident I'd want to leave a HDD on a shelf for three years and then switch it on either.
Editted to add ...
Have just read your second post ... tape capcity the last time I looked was pretty pathetic. The tapes are also pretty bulky. Physical data density was certainly much higher with HDD the last time I looked, but that was a couple of years ago. I have no idea how long tape data is stable for. Certainly not confident I'd want to leave a HDD on a shelf for three years and then switch it on either.
Edited by ATG on Tuesday 25th July 15:13
Problem is the drives ain't cheap, something like a LTO drive would suffice nicely, but we're on LTO 3 now and LTo 4s not far away. They are backwards compatible, but only 1 varient for write if I remember correctly. So an LTO 3 drive can write to an LTO 2 tape, but only read LTO 1.
Speeds are quite impressive if set correctly, typically on a LTO 2 for example I often see 45-50 MB/sec (over fibre), not too bad. Tape age, depends on quality and how's it's used and kept, but in theory 10+ years.
Capacity wise, LTO 2 are 200/400 GB (native/compressed) and LTO 3 400/800GB.
Martin
Edited by mph999 on Tuesday 25th July 17:58
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