Backup to External Hard Drive 1

[Atreyu8]

Hello,
I don't like tape. It is costly and requires more attention than my small company can give it... so, my intentions are to use an external hard drive to make a completely automated 7-day (GFS enabled) rotational backup.
Has anyone accomplished this here?
My current problem, while attempting to create such a backup system, is this:

When creating a "file system device" through the device configuration wizard, I can only create one media per device. Is there a way to make 23 media work on one file system device? Or does one need to make 23 file system devices and have one media per device (in order to make it fully automated)?

I require 23 media because that is what is required to make a 7 day rotation backup. Any additional advice I can get in order to accomplish my goal would be appreciated!!! Any takers???

 

[Cyklops]

You can do this create by creating 23 file system devices and naming them all with exactly the same name. Then put all 23 devices in the same device group and it will act as a tape library with 23 slots. This way you can run a GFS rotation scheme with backup to disk.

regards

 

[Atreyu8]

Thanks Cyklops! I wonder if other companies are changing to this type of backup system? It seems so much more reliable, affordable, and faster.

 

[Cyklops]

On that point I do not agree with you. With this system you have all your backup jobs on just one media carrier ( which still isn't as reliable as tape when you do a lot of transportation with it ) and thus created a single point of failure. It also isn't very scalable. What if you want to backup TB's of data with this ??

regards

 

[Atreyu8]

Not so... The hard drives are firewire, so one can daisy chain up to 63 devices to a single computer. Since each hard drive is 120 GB, backing up a TB would require only 9 drives. Additionally, the firewire enclosures use standard off the shelf hard drives, so when 300 GB hard drives are available/affordable in a year, the old hard drives can be swapped out with larger drives. I plan on addressing the single point of failure issue by using a second hard drive that gets taken off-site on a weekly basis.

 

[CallwaveEmp]

I am intrigued by this solution - however, how do you intend to address offsite backup?

 

[Atreyu8]

In theory, I could use two hard drives that have the exact same file system devices (i.e. virtual tape drives and virtual tapes) and then alternate the on-site and off-site drives each night. Or... create a second job that does a full backup each Thursday night on a second hard drive and store the drive off-site each Friday. Or... use two hard drives and two alike backup jobs and run them simultaneously (like RAID) and store one off-site... Or if one is very lazy and has lots of cash lying around, setup a computer off-site and VPN in with a full GFS rotation job so that one has two duplicate backups, one on-site, and one off-site, at all times without having to move the media.
The whole reason why I had to design such a system in the first place was because nobody at my company was responsible enough to change the tapes on a nightly basis. A fully-automated backup on a hard drive was my only viable solution, and it ended up costing less money than purchasing another tape drive + a full set of tapes + an auto loader. Two 120 GB firewire hard drives cost my company only $650.