Thinking of SATA Raid w/ Removeable Drives instead of Tapes..

[NipsMG]

I'm thinking about going with Granite Digital's SATA Hotswap solution to do backups instead of tape. Tape is slow, and is a royal pain in the ass, and the drives have been less than reliable in my experience.

Since the daily tapes never go offsite (only weekly), I don't see the point of using tapes during the week. And since SATA Drives are relatively cheap, I can't find an advantage to tape. (These even come with padded drive bags to carry around the backup drives in).

Can anyone see why it wouldn't be worth it to convert to SATA over tape?

Oh, here's the unit I'm thinking about:

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg56_satahot-swapbackup8.htm

Thanks.

NipsMG

 

[Yrrk]

1. Tape always beats disk in cost per megabyte storage. Largest SATA drive i've seen today is 320GB and runs over $200ea. An SDLT600 tape is usually less then $100ea. LTO-3 stores 400GB native and also runs under $100ea.

2. Physical storage costs. Tapes are smaller then hard drives. At some point this is an issue if you're large enough or retaining data far enough back.

3. Tapes are more durable. I have years of experience in this department. I have seen all kinds of tapes dropped from shoulder height to hard floors and survive unscathed *most of the time*. While I don't have the same personal experience with hard drives, i'd put money on them suffering serious damage more often.

Of course small shoppes won't see much in the above benefits..

 

[NipsMG]

Ok, I guess I should have elaborated slightly.

I work for a company with 120 employees, 3/4 of which use their computers rarely. We've got about 150 gigs to store at the moment, however a lot of it is old customer data from years ago that we're in the process of getting rid of.

The tapes may be cheaper, however 400gb LTO drives cost MUCH more than an SATA drive array. We'd need a LARGE number of SATA drives purchased before we even got close to the LTO Tape drive, and that's usually a drive with a single tape. The array holds 8 drives at a time.

I'll go with tapes if it's the best thing to do. Anyone else have opinions, or Yrrk - if you have anything further to add, I'd appreciate all the opinions on this topic I can get, and especially any resources discussing the benefits of either over the other.

Thanks!

--NipsMG.

 

[Yrrk]

Right.. like i said a smaller shoppe may not see the value in the above.

There is nothing wrong with storing backups on disk per say, so long as you follow proper precautions. It's just another piece of media like tape, optical, etc. Like any media, it can and will fail, get corrupted, accidently deleted (user error), etc.

Thats where best practices come in. The kinds of things often defined in a business continuity or DR plan. Again your mileage may vary based on the importance of the data but things like:

-keeping more then 1 copy of your data
-keeping one copy at a different physical location (offsite)
-retaining data long enough (45 days is comon)
-keeping multiple versions of your data as it gets update (who knows when corruption occurs and you might want an older version?)

It's these types of things that will protect your data morso then media selection. I'm getting off track here though as thats not really what you asked.

 

[funstuie]

Hello mate

I have been thinking of the same kind of thing. What software solution where you thinking of using?

I have been using robocopy for a while with a small scale backup server. 4x internal, 4x external hot swapable drives. It works ok but I need to find a decent backup software.

Stu