Backup Storage Advice

A

Aoreugif

n00b
Joined
Dec 3, 2008
Messages
11
I'm in need of some storage advice for my daily backups. Right now I use an dell desktop with 2 1tb HD's attached with Acronis running the backups for 10 win 7 pc's. I have Acronis set up to alternate between the 2 hard drive's for some redundancy. Now that my budget allows for some upgrades I'm looking at a better storage solution. Should I get a raid to store my backups or a NAS? I'm kind of looking at a raid setup for the desktop cause thats where my Acronis management is at.

Thanks for you input on this
 
If this is a business I would get an LTO3 or LTO4 (or even LTO5) autochanger or single drive and forget disk based backups.

If you vote against that and go for raid based backups use 2 independent raids (backing up everything at least 1 time to each raid). I mean that last thing you want is loosing all of your backups because of a raid failure.

A second method of disk backups is to not put the backups on raid. Make at least 2 copies of each backup and use individual disks / hot swapping drives just like you would with tapes.
 
A tape drive costs about as much as 10 to 20 2TB external hard drives and an ESATA docking station.

Use 2TB hard drives and come up with a scheme of full and incremental backups that will meet your needs.

I guess the only concern is how long a full backup takes. Hours is tolerable. Days is a bit too long.
 
Is this business data or personal?

Backups from what? Accidental erasing, user error, virus, drive failure?

Fire, water, theft? (Need an off-site solution.)

How much total data are we talking?
 
drescherjm said:
A second method of disk backups is to not put the backups on raid. Make at least 2 copies of each backup and use individual disks / hot swapping drives just like you would with tapes.
Click to expand...

Thats what i do (admittedly for personal use), i have used Tape and i am not really a fan, i have 3 hotswap bays and loads of caddy and i just hotwap as required (the hotsawp bays and caddy's were $15 and $8 AU$ each respectively)

Tape drives cost $$$$ where as hotswap bays are pretty cheap and the tapes are not really that much cheaper per TB any way
 
Raid is NOT a backup!!!!


Now that that information is out of the way....answer Homer's question.

Tape cost more because they are better, short of a magnet, they are better for backups versus a mechanical device, why tapes are still an industry standard for backups.
 
Tape drives cost $$$$ where as hotswap bays are pretty cheap and the tapes are not really that much cheaper per TB any way
Click to expand...

The biggest two benifits of tapes are speed and reliability. A single tape is significantly more reliable than a single hard drive. And also easier to store and transport. As for speed modern tape drives backup data faster than hard drives if you consider encryption and compression. For example an LTO4 drive will compress data at 240 MB/s (assuming 2:1 compression) provided you can somehow feed the tape that fast (multiple gigabit nics and concurrent backups).

I do agree though for personal use or unless you have 20TB or more to backup disks will be cheaper. At home my backups are on disk. Although for business I would almost always use tape. I know there are "cloud" backups but I do not trust them and they are not cheap when you go to 10s of TB (which I manage at work). Not to mention baking up this much data to the cloud will be horrendously slow compared to multiple gigabit links or 10GE
 
Last edited:
Tapes are more reliable and do not go bad, even if you do not use them for a while. You can store them for years and if you need to use thier info, just load them in a tape drive and you will be able to read the info. That is not the same story with disk drives. If you stop using them for a number of months they can get stock and then you have to pay big bucks to recover the info. Besies, disk tend to go bad even if you use them often. Unless you have a Raid configuration with multiple drives, then you do not really have a secure backup system.

Yes Tape drives are expensive, but you can buy used ones with LTO1, or LTO2 technology from very reliable third party resellers that sell decomissioned equipment. They actually sell this type of units to big corporations. Just google them.

I vote for tape as a more reliable back up system.
 
Unless you have a Raid configuration with multiple drives, then you do not really have a secure backup system.
Click to expand...

I do not even consider that secure. If you go the raid route you need multiple independent raids each containing a full backup of everything that needs to be protected. The reason is any single raid (even raid 5 or 6) can fail. I have seen this happen more than once with hardware raid 5 cards at work when I was not in control of our data..
 
I agree with you, even a bunch of disk in any Raid arraigment could fail. That is why I vote for tape, they are a lot more reliable.

Just got to be carful not to over use the actual tape. But, if you use different sets of tapes you should be fine.
 
a customer i used to have ran their backup scheme like this; they had about a dozen computers that needed to get backed up daily. fire/flood/theft wasnt a huge concern, but was still taken into account.

daily- wake on lan and backup all computers at midnight, the backup server had a RAID6 array of 6 main disks with 2 hot spares. i would get an automatic txt message if a disk kicked the bucket.

weekly- a snapshot of the RAID was dumped onto tape automatically every friday night. this tape was stored in the server room which had pretty good security. i would get a txt message saying if this had been done successfully. there was a rotation of 8 tapes (8 weeks) before they would be reused. tapes that were not currently in the tape drive were put in a fire resistant storage locker.

monthly- a snapshot of the RAID was manually stored on tape and the owner took that tape to a vault off premises. even in the unlikely event the building burned down or was bombed by ze germans, they would only loose 30 days of data at most. there was a rotation of 6 tapes (6 months) before they would be reused.

i think this was a pretty robust backup procedure and have suggested it a few times since.
 
ghost6303:

Thanks for sharing, that looks like a very robust backup procedure. Many of the companies we deal with use something similar. Data is way to valuable and any extra precaution you can take is always a big plus.

What brand (type or model) of disk arrays and tape libraries were you using?

You can never be too careful with data. Either on the job or at home.
 
El Santo said:
Tapes are more reliable and do not go bad, even if you do not use them for a while. You can store them for years and if you need to use thier info, just load them in a tape drive and you will be able to read the info. That is not the same story with disk drives. If you stop using them for a number of months they can get stock and then you have to pay big bucks to recover the info. .
Click to expand...

Thanks for the laughs!
 
What laughs? Everything he said in what you quoted is true. Disks do not make good long term storage devices because after a long period of inactivity they are not gauranteed to spin up. Disks are also significantly less reliable than tapes and can die at any time at all. While tapes can and do break I have not had a single tape break in the last 10 years and in the same time had a 1% to 7% annual failure rate on disks with a significant percentage (> 30%) of the drives died in less than 3 years.
 
drescherjm said:
While tapes can and do break I have not had a single tape break in the last 10 years and in the same time had a 1% to 7% annual failure rate on disks with a significant percentage (> 30%) of the drives died in less than 3 years.
Click to expand...

That 1 to 7% failure rate is for HDDs that are being used all the time, right?

It would be interesting to see what the HDD failure rate is for HDDs used like tapes -- written to periodically and otherwise kept idle and spun-down.
 
john4200 said:
That 1 to 7% failure rate is for HDDs that are being used all the time, right?
Click to expand...

Yes. Over a 13 to 14 year period of drives used all the time. This includes all failures except DOA.

Also to note, I generally retire older drives after I see a few failures from the same batch. For example 4 or 5 x 250 GB WDC sata 1 drives from 2004/2005 died this year so I retired a 10 drive raid 6 array containing the same drives to avoid having any more problems.

It would be interesting to see what the HDD failure rate is for HDDs used like tapes -- written to periodically and otherwise kept idle and spun-down.
Click to expand...

I can not say much about that. At work I do not use hard drives as backup devices (well not very much) at home I do backup to disk but the # of disks would be so low so I really could not say anything statistically.
 
So.. Again...........RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.....

Raid provides REDUNDANCY

Please people who don't know this, learn it.
 
RAID is not a back up of itself, but you can back stuff up on to a RAID array, which gives you more protection then if you were to back up the same data but on a single hard drive. i dont think anyone ever said if you store data on a RAID array it doesnt have to be backed up.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bianca/fast07.pdf
is a good study on disk failure rates, and has some good explanations and statistics of different types of failure.
 
well I would follow along with what some of the others said.

raid is not a backup but helps if you use two separate arrays



I would auto backup all the desktops to a raid 5 daily, then when that finishes dump it to a LTO5, seeing as you need the space. This kinda follows the model we have at work. When once a week rotate a tape out to an off-site location. I would use a 14 day rotation, if you could afford the 14 LTO5s and the tape drive.

I dont like auto-loader tape drives, because at my last drive it screwed up and ate some tapes. Nothing is more reliable than me switching out the tapes myself.
 
I dont like auto-loader tape drives, because at my last drive it screwed up and ate some tapes. Nothing is more reliable than me switching out the tapes myself.
Click to expand...

I really like my 2 drive 24 slot autoloader I have at work. To me it means that I have to change tapes about 1 time every 3 months. The rest of the backup process is completely automated. With that said today if I were buying today, I would probably get an LTO5 drive.
 
Backing up to disk (for speed) and then to tapes (for reliable storage of back up data) as you do it, it is the way to go. Someone above laughed when I said that tapes are more reliable and in fact they are. But, a tape that is used constantly must eventually be replaced by new ones. They do not last forever if they are in constant used. But as long as they are not often used a tape will be as good today as in ten years.
 
***BUMP***

A bit of a bump, but can I ask why no one is bringing up online backup? Is tape still the standard?

 
ciggwin said:
***BUMP***

A bit of a bump, but can I ask why no one is bringing up online backup? Is tape still the standard?

Click to expand...

Way too expensive for TB of data let alone I can not imagine sending 20+ TB over a 10 megabit link. Then there is security / trust issues.
 
why rely on another company if you can do it yourself, some people don't trust online companies, what if they go down, lose your data, get hacked, not to mention bandwidth costs for sending and retrieving the data when your talking hundreds of gigs or terrabytes of data to be transfered.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top