Backing up a TB

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RallyMK1

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Well, I believe I'll be joining the terabyte club pretty soon (two 120g WD, two 400g WD, both striped independently), but I'm worried about backing up that much data. What would be the most stable backup possible? I've been looking at tape drives; being able to rewrite for updates would be great, but I'm worried about magnetic degredation. I'd rather not use over one hundred DL-DVDs either. Does anyone here have any advice?
Thanks in advance.
 
If it's really that imporant, get a LTO2/3 tape drive and a few tapes, backup as needed.

Tapes are the defacto standard for long-term reliable backup.

Or build a RAID 5 array to copy your data to...two copies is better than none.
 
A TB is a bitch to backup but from what i've seen, unfortunately a tape drive might be your only solution for now.
 
Find out what you really need to backup (spreadsheets, dbs, etc) and go off that. I mean really, not counting DVD Rips and MP3s and such, do you really have that much irreplacable data?
 
I can barely manage to backup my 160... you guys are talking about a tb...
I was curious and looked up tape backups on newegg and the drives are expensive stuff :eek: tapes seem to go up to 400gb which is crazy impressive... but tapes? they dont seem very reliable...

Perhaps 4 300gb drives at $90 would be better?
 
awdark said:
I can barely manage to backup my 160... you guys are talking about a tb...
I was curious and looked up tape backups on newegg and the drives are expensive stuff :eek: tapes seem to go up to 400gb which is crazy impressive... but tapes? they dont seem very reliable...

Perhaps 4 300gb drives at $90 would be better?
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Tapes are not reliable in the least, i'm sure people will say otherwise. We sell tape backups to our clients to backup data via sco open server 5.0.5 and 5.0.6 and 30% of them have problems consistently. Needless to say we are trying to find a new way to backup their data on a daily basis.
 
We back up 9TB of data to tapes at work via Veritas/Symantec Backup Exec and Netbackup. Sure Tapes can go bad from repeated use, can be damaged by harsh environments, but for long term storage and disaster recovery, it is the only real solution. We use drive arrays as well for fast onsite recovery, but not every project can afford the initial costs vs. possible down time.
 
Tape is a very reliable solution as long as you take care to protect your tapes. people say to backup to disk and stuff , but after a few monthes, that space will fill up, and then you are back to where you started from .

Get a single disk LTO3 tape drive like a Dell PV110T, not an autoloader , and I recomend backup exec from Veritas as the software. Make sure that you get an IBM drive and not a Cendant drive. Those suck . IBM makes the best tape drives
 
unhappy_mage said:
You'd have him back up onto a raid 0 array?

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How likely is it that both his internal, and external arrays are going to fail simultaneously?

Unless his external device is dead and he doesn't know it after backing up to it and turning it off, he should be fine.
 
I mean really, not counting DVD Rips and MP3s and such, do you really have that much irreplacable data?
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Keep it real, and keep it legal. We don't care what you do, but we don't want to hear about it. - DougLite

I really appreciate the tape drive advice, but it still sounds too unreliable for its (initial) expense. After talking with a few of my other friends I decided that backing things up to DVD every time I get enough things to fill one will work out well enough. The problem I had with it at first stemmed from thinking "How am I going to backup 1TB all at once?". Of course, I'm not going to collect that much at once, so I think this will work out. I've got two spindles of Taiyo Yuden DVDs and a couple of binders, now I just need to work out an indexing system. ;)

Once again, thanks for the advice.
 
Think that's big look at the 10K model just below it, 11,107 TB, 11PB...that's...hot....
 
maybe a DAT based backup?

I don't think RAID 5 is a real backup solution. I am waiting for blu-ray or HD-DVD or something to come out so I can backup cheaply to some WORM type disk. Remeber when you could backup all your data in a couple of CDRs?
 
Swatchie said:
Tape is a very reliable solution as long as you take care to protect your tapes. people say to backup to disk and stuff , but after a few monthes, that space will fill up, and then you are back to where you started from .

Get a single disk LTO3 tape drive like a Dell PV110T, not an autoloader , and I recomend backup exec from Veritas as the software. Make sure that you get an IBM drive and not a Cendant drive. Those suck . IBM makes the best tape drives
Click to expand...


IBM drives suck IMO even though they are made by HP. We average 10-12 months on our LTO 2 drives before they take a dump. Not so good considering the price. Our SDLT 320 drives seem to last though.
 
ohknats said:
IBM drives suck IMO even though they are made by HP. We average 10-12 months on our LTO 2 drives before they take a dump. Not so good considering the price. Our SDLT 320 drives seem to last though.
Click to expand...
That is fairly coincidental.

Our Overland Powerloader's (purchased in...February/March earlier this year) HP LTO2 drive took a vacation on us a month or so ago so we RMA'd the whole damn thing. The new unit has been working as expected since then.
 
You mgiht want to edit this post to remove unnecessary mini-modding, but I'll take care of that for you ;) - DougLite

justin82 said:
heheh

http://www.adic.com/ibeCCtpSctDspRte.jsp?section=10023

nuff said
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It's still tape.. and with his reasoning, and his budget.. I'm thinking no.

Personally, if it was me.. I would just sell all the drives that are smaller than 400gb.. use that money to buy some more 400gb drives.. and a raid6 capable card.. and build a raid6 array and say fsck it. Of course, I did this exact thing, but with 200s.. [I did it 2 years ago.. was raid5 at the time.. Is now raid6.] Fortunately, I had a reason to build a 2TB array for a client, so.. for "stability testing" I backed up my 1.6 TB to his 2TB, then formatted the ENTIRE ARRAY and rebuilt it as a raid6, BLANK.. then copied all the data back..
 
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