Backup to disk - pros and cons 1

[Sverre]

I have Veritas Backup Exec 9.1 running on a Win 2003 server with Travan 20/40GB tapes. I am using a rotation on 5 identical tapes for each weekday to backup business critical data on a total of 3 servers, always keeping the last used tape outside our building. Lately I have got a capacity-problem and therefore are considering to implement som new hardware to backup the data.

I am leaning towards buying a couple of external USB/firewire disks and setting up backup to Disk in Veritas. The idea is to change beetween the two disks each day. One thing a can see as a possible problem with this compared to the 5 tape solution, is that if somebody is creating/deleting or otherwise "corrupt" data, I only have two days to discover it before an disk a crash. Today I can go back 5 days to get some missing or corrupted files. So far this never happend.

Can somebody give me some good advice and some pros and con to deside between a new tape solution or a backup to disk solution.

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There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary numbers and those who don't

 

[watchcow]

I have been doing backup to disk for over a year now and have had a few problems. the one basic issue is that if you need to archive data, backup to disk is not such a pleasant option. after the backup to disk job runs, the options to move the data offline are pretty limited. this will require tape and possibly the inconvenience of spanning tapes, or you can use removable hard drives. the option to invest in good quality removable hard drive carriers like the Promise "Superswap 1000" has been good for us. 160 to 250 gig drives are inexpensive and durable and have a long shelf life if you need to read the data later.

the thing i have had the most problem with is that we spool very large backup to disk jobs off to tape via a DLT tape robot. some of these jobs are nearly 400Gb now and we strive for a 60 week retention period. veritas kills me here. there is no way i have found to translate the backup to disk job to a directly readable tape job without restoring it someplace else, then backing it up to tape again. if you take the huge .bkf files and spool those to tape, then to read one you have ot fully restore the file, then catalog the file if it is out of retention, and then restore it. moving these files is a pain as well. rather than moving them i use batch files to changes the names of the folders in which the files live. rather than waste time trying to copy from a single backup to disk folder out to daily folders, we have one folder named "today", and then a foder for each day of the week. since the backup to disk folders have to contain the veritas media marker files, i simply copy those to each of these folders as well. then your batch renames the today folder to temp, then renames the next daily folder to today and renames the temp folder to the day of the week in which the job ran. that way the backup job can always be writign to the folder named "today" and saves the hassle of having to move data on the drive.

If offsite and availablity are really important, get two huge ide drives and a simple array controler that can maintian a mirror of these daily or weekly backups, in the server or even a retired desktop PC. then user the removable drive caddies or a usb or firewire drive to catch a copy of the most recent backup so you have that to carry offsite each day or week and you still have nearline storage of your last several backups.

this can be implemented for relatively low cost and then you can start using your tape backup for archival purposes since there wonlt be the pressure to have the tape immediately available.

the other tool that has become a very valuable part of our business model is to upgrade everything to windows server 2003 and enable volume shadow copy on any volume that holds volatile data. make this part of your planning in purchasing storage and set aside about 10 to 20 percent of your total storage volume for shadow copy cache.

hopefully these ideas will help.

 

[Sverre]

Hi!

Thank you Watchcow.

I finally desided to buy 3 Maxtor one-touch 100GB external USB disks and a new USB2 controller card. Changing betweeen theese three disk each day (night). Allways keeping the last used disk offsite the next 24 hours. Backup of about 30GB every night takes only about 2 hours (with verify). This used to take about 6-7 hour on the tapes.

Everything seemes to work fine - so far. I have been running this for nearly three weeks now. simple file restore test worked very well.

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There are only 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary numbers and those who don't

 

[richw1234]

Have you thought about backing up the removable disks to tape as a precaution?