Tape SUCKS! What else is there? 1

[seanh012]

God almighty, I've run into another problem restoring critical files from tape. The stupid tape is corrupt somehow. Of course neither the manufacturer of the tape or the backup software vendor (veritas) has an answer other than "that happens. sucks to be you."

This tape has been used 3 times! I just bought the thing a few months ago and put it into my rotation. Now I've got a situation where a user created some files, then deleted them the next day, so they are only on this one tape.

Everything in the logs about the backup job looks nominal! There are no exceptions or anything. Still, somehow, the tape is unreadable. After sitting in a safe for a week.

This is far from the first time I've had stupidities with tape. Although it happened far more often with DDS, it does happen with DLT as well.

So now the IT department looks incompetent because "we aren't doing proper backups". Jesus christ how can we be expected to do so when our tools routinely fail us through no fault of our own? Should we run 2 tapes for every backup job just in case one decides to be unreadable?

I seriously am at the point where I am just going to chuck my DLT drive altogether. If I choose this route, what are my options?

Thanks
Sean

 

[dohc97]

We are currently doing a parallel backup of our systems using DS3. It is an online backup system where data are being kept in an offsite vault. I currently run backups on DS3 daily and just do a weekly tape backup using veritas.

 

[Eddiefdz]

Sean,

I use RSYNC in linux to do all my Windows backups. I have rsync running as a windows service on my win2k servers. Then i have a redhat 9 system with an 800gb raid.(4, 200gb hardrives, striped.) Rsync creates daily images of those directories and then i created a script witch actually creates all the diff files for me. The best thing is that rsync runs backups using byte level transfer, so of course, it wont transfer the complete file just whatever changed then uses the previous date info to build the file and I have all the daily versions of the file and I could go back atleast one month. Of course if you wanted to go back further you could always store the diffs for longer. Now in my situation I backup about 500gb of data so for you it may not be that much. Anyways I have 2 of those servers in house
and then a third that i run offsite. The offsite runs over a dsl line and let me tell you that its a beauty. I used to use tape and just as you mentioned I had problems like crazy. I have been using this linux approach for a year and I have had no problems, every time i have needed a file it has been there. Let me know if you want further info and ill help u out.

Eddie Fernandez
CCNA, Network+, A+, MCP