Backups....

[gbaughma]

With hard drive sizes getting 400, 500, 750GB in size, how are we going to back up this information?

Even with BluRay, that is only about 50GB of storage.

Tape drives do 80, 100GB.... unless you get into a library so you can span tapes.

It would take 625 CD-R's to back up 400MB.
It would take 86 DVD's to back up 400MB
It would take 48 DVD-DL's to back up 400MB
It would take 8 BluRay discs to back up 400MB (at 50GB each)

So, how are we going to protect our data?
And I mean offsite storage. I don't consider RAID arrays as backups.

The only solution I can think of is an external portable drive... but that has it's own issues (reliability, don't drop it, etc....)

We think of all this huge storage.. but we don't consider how to protect it and back it up. What do you think is the future of *backups*?



Just my 2¢
"Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste." -Bonnie Raitt "Nick of Time"
--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[LadySlinger]

Ummm...I take it you meant:

It would take 625 CD-Rs to back up 400 GB
instead of MB?

We're beginning to see an increase of backups on our weekly backups as well.
We're using about 2 tapes for each weekly backup.

In anycase, I know there are the NAS units where you can buy in TB, but I don't consider those legit backups unless your rack happens to have some fire proof rating with it.

I think there will be a shift to co-locations in the next 5 years or some form similar to. I know they are really expensive, but so can the cost of tapes, DVDs, etc.

Either that or the backup industry needs to produce a media that stores more than 4 GB or so of space. Or in the case of tapes, larger than the SDLT 320.

 

[jrbarnett]

I read the following article earlier today:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/12/company_data_storage/

and it has similar thoughts on ways to tackle this issue, by reducing the data storage requirements in the first place.

John

 

[gbaughma]

LadySlinger: Yes... GB not MB. Brain fart.

I haven't lost my mind... it's backed up on tape somewhere.

Luckily, I can still fit the entire backup on a DDS4 tape...



Just my 2¢
"Life gets mighty precious when there's less of it to waste." -Bonnie Raitt "Nick of Time"
--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[AlexCuse]

Greg, I can back up my mind on a 5.25 floppy, so don't feel too bad!

John - great article. The main challenge is just to convince management of what is actually crucial ;-)

Ignorance of certain subjects is a great part of wisdom

 

[Sympology]

For our critical systems we use offsite replication.
We have 4 core apps (excludes such things as Notes, DC's, internal web servers), these are duplcated pretty much realtime to servers at a remote site over a MAN link. For others, we have a couple of tape libaries. For less cricitcal apps, we actually back up to other servers. For example a Notes server may be backed up by the DC, PBX, by Notes etc. Bit concolouted, but gives a bit more resliance.

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[Glenn9999]

Maybe the answer is coming?

http://www.computerworld.com/action...ArticleBasic&articleId=9011144&intsrc=hm_list

 

[DTodd83]

My company was using about 20 100GB tapes up until a few weeks ago. We installed a new Quantum tape library and we are using 5 400GB tapes now.

Check this product out. It usually takes a little less time to run the backup and we fit more on one tape.

http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/DLT/DLT-S4/Index.aspx

We then ship it offsite.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Hmmm... maybe I'm missing something... but you do know there are LTO tape drives available to backup 400 GB Natively... and the LTO4 standard was released recently and 800 GB Native capacity tape drives should be available soon. But really, if you have that much data to backup, you need to either get multiple tape drives, stagger your backup schedule (half one night, the other half the next night), or buy a library. Any business I've worked with with that much data to backup has always used a library.

 

[sostek]

We've run into that problem already. We've got about 200GB of data to backup regularly and most tape drives that we have are 20/40GB.

We also found tape to be somewhat unreliable. So we bought an HP Proliant ML150 G3 with 2TB of space on it. Used Debian and rsnapshot as well as the lvm to join the two 500GB partitions together as a 1TB array.

It works great. You can retrieve files via a web client, and overall it's worth its weight in gold.

We are backing it up monthly to 500GB HD's which then get archived.