[ale] Backup strategies

Pat Regan thehead at patshead.com
Fri Sep 12 15:58:41 EDT 2008


Jeff Lightner wrote:
> Not familiar with the PowerVault line but there are many tape "robots"
> or "libraries" that will handle the tape movement for you.   I've seen
> them with as few as 2 drives and 10 slots.  I'm sure there are probably
> smaller models that have only 1 drive and fewer slots as well.   Here we
> use a library with 20 drives and 600 slots (not to mention some Data
> Domain deduplication devices) but we're doing substantially more than
> 500 GB.

You don't have the kind of budget constraints the guys using USB drives
have :).

I know what it is like with the volume of tapes you are dealing with.  I
used to have to deal with backing up about 5-6 terabytes when 35/70 DLT
tapes were still pretty big.

> Of course tape handling also requires someone to eject the tapes and
> hand them to the offsite folks but you presumably have to do that for
> your USB solution as well.

At small volumes of data change, maybe a few GB per day, I'm a huge fan
of backing up data to an off-site server over the network.  Of course,
that really only works well if your company actually has more than one site.

In fact, I'd prefer to two of those.  One copy local and one off site.
If you're a one man IT department (like I was for two years recently) it
is hugely helpful to not have to be in the building on a semi-daily
basis to make all that happen.

> I would definitely NOT leave it all on one device (NAS or Dedupe) in the
> data center.   What happens if that one device fries?  What happens if
> you lose the data center and lose both the original 500 GB and whatever
> you'd backed up in a device in the same location?

A lack of off-site backups is just asking for trouble.  A single
location for all your backups is also asking for trouble.

If I were a small in a one man shop again I would want to run an online
daily off-site backup and a weekly or monthly tape backup for archival
purposes.

Pat

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