Tape back up suggestions

Chevron

Chevron

Serial breaker of phones
Joined
Oct 2, 2007
Messages
25,893
Reaction score
59
Location
Joburg
I have been tasked with doing some research on finding a tape backup solution that will be onsite on a companies premises.

They use exchange.

I unfortunately do have all the numbers yet on what they want backed up. It's about 20 users.

What entry level systems are available that will have room for growth?

Any and all advice welcome.
 
With tape unfortunately entry level and growth do not go together at all (when you run out of space, you have to upgrade everything) - although tapes have a natural growth path because you can simply use another tape.

For hardware, look at a DAT72. The most important thing here is to make people aware of the cost implications of email, i.e. tell them it is not free, and has an associated cost maintain. A drive is around R5500 and tapes around R150 - so the entire solution is under R10k. If 36/72GB is too little, then either make people delete some stuff, or back up to disk first and then backup to multiple tapes during the day.

The tape drive should come with Backup Exec software, but if you want to backup and restore individual mailboxes, instead of the entire mail store, then you may need to buy an Exchange agent which costs a few thousand rand.
 
It may be worth considering backing up to external disk rather than tape, with inexpensive 2 TB devices this could be a good option. The size of these devices is increasing regularly.

Use more than one, say one per week with the unused drives being store off site.

Backup Exec handles this scenario well.


Tape is expensive, doubly so in a couple of years when you update to a new, incompatible device!
 
bekdik said:
It may be worth considering backing up to external disk rather than tape, with inexpensive 2 TB devices this could be a good option. The size of these devices is increasing regularly.

Use more than one, say one per week with the unused drives being store off site.

Backup Exec handles this scenario well.


Tape is expensive, doubly so in a couple of years when you update to a new, incompatible device!
Click to expand...

The problem is that backing up to HDD is not a substitute for tape, nor is it cheaper over time, and I outline the scenario below:

A legal/accounting firm needs to keep data for 5 years, and decide on a GFS backup strategy. After five years, you have all your backups spread over two disks (cost R4000). If one disk fails, you stand a chance of losing a daily, monthly and yearly backup. Archiving becomes a problem, unless you archive and replicate to both disks to protect against a failure; which is more likely on a mechanical disk that is carried around.

A tape solution will cost around R8k, and allows proper GFS backups and archiving over a longer period. If you want to store 2009 data in a safe for 20 years it will cost R150 for a tape. With HDD it will cost the price of a new disk....

Disk backups have their place, but I do not think they are necessarily cheaper, nor a direct replacement for tape (or any other similar media).
 
HDD backups are more suited to data that change frequently, ie. need speedy backup/restores, and don't need to be stored for long periods.
Tapes would be better suited for financial systems like Conradl's scenario. Tapes, in general, could be stored for long periods without data loss.

Here is some info on using Bacula to back up Exchange. Not a very elegant solution, but if you want to save money on software licenses, it might be a solution until funding for a better suited backup software can be found. http://wiki.bacula.org/doku.php?id=application_specific_backups:exchange_server
 
Conradl said:
With tape unfortunately entry level and growth do not go together at all (when you run out of space, you have to upgrade everything) - although tapes have a natural growth path because you can simply use another tape.

For hardware, look at a DAT72. The most important thing here is to make people aware of the cost implications of email, i.e. tell them it is not free, and has an associated cost maintain. A drive is around R5500 and tapes around R150 - so the entire solution is under R10k. If 36/72GB is too little, then either make people delete some stuff, or back up to disk first and then backup to multiple tapes during the day.

The tape drive should come with Backup Exec software, but if you want to backup and restore individual mailboxes, instead of the entire mail store, then you may need to buy an Exchange agent which costs a few thousand rand.
Click to expand...

Can't you tapes that are around 800gigs though? Will they work with a dat72?
 
Conradl said:
Those solutions are BIG$$$ (tens of thousands of rands). An 800GB tape will not work in a 72 dat drive....
Click to expand...

Jip, those Ultrium LTO jobs is around R2000 per 400GB (uncompressed) tape. That was 2/3 years ago though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X