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Data Tape Backup Scheme

S

Sayth

Gawd
Joined
Oct 7, 2001
Messages
618
I am trying to come up with a "Grandfather, Father, Son" backup scheme for my office. Can I get some advice? I have 20 TB of data to backup.

I was thinking;

Sat-Mon-Tues-Wed-Thur-Fri-Sun = Incremental
Every 2 weeks = Full (onsite)
Last day of each month = Full (offsite)

Grandfather: Stored offsite. Recycled after 6 months. 120TB
Father set 1: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 60TB
Father set 2: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 60TB
Incremental: Stored onsite. Recycled every 2 weeks. 60TB

Does this look right? I will need 300TB for this setup? I'm using HP LTO Ultrium RW Data Tapes @ 1.6TB each and a 24tape autoloader.

Thanks!
 
You have an LTO5 tape drive?
Click to expand...

Good point. Never ever expect the 2.0 or 2.6 to 1 that manufacturers claim because it is optimistic at best. I typically get 1.5:1 on LTO2 media so that is 300GB on a 200GB native tape that the manufacturer calls 400GB.
 
I deal with tape backup everday and the average compression ratio is 1.2:1 or 1.4:1. Anything more than 1.5:1 is a miracle. It all depends on what data you're backing up too.
 
My opinion is tapes are too much labor.
Perhaps look into building a Microsoft DPM server. They have a 180 day trial on the software and the licensing is very reasonable. Then you could just backup to disk and archive to tape periodically.
This would be much cleaner and cheaper I think.
 
With an autochanger its not that much work. I have to change tapes probably 1 time per 3 months and the backups and everything else is automatic.
 
brandinb said:
My opinion is tapes are too much labor.
Perhaps look into building a Microsoft DPM server. They have a 180 day trial on the software and the licensing is very reasonable. Then you could just backup to disk and archive to tape periodically.
This would be much cleaner and cheaper I think.
Click to expand...

This^^^

We set this up at one of my clients and its working wonderfully.
Although the financial auditors does like it, cause the reporting sucks cause its not job based.
 
The tapes state on the box that they are 1.6TB assuming 2:1 ratio. You're suggesting I will only get about 1.2:1 average? So roughly 1TB per tape?

This is my first time working with tapes. The managers bought the equipment under the software manufacturer's recommendation so I have 24 of these tapes at the moment and a Sun SL24 Auto tape loader.

So needless to say, the money is spent, I'm stuck with tape backup. I just need to learn to use them. The guy who recommended the solution said to management, "Well uhuh ya just gotta take out the old tapes and put new ones in every month or so. Then recycle your tapes. uhuh cause I'm a big douche bag and you'll believe whatever I say uhuh." He forgot to mention the hassle of tapes and configuring the backup. So that's where I come in. I was never supposed to be a part of this project. Don't we all love management?

Anyway... I rearranged my plan a little.

Grandfather: Stored offsite. Recycled after 6 months. 120 TB
Father set 1: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 60 TB
Father set 2: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 60 TB
Increment set 1: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 40 TB
Increment set 2: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 40 TB
Total: ......................................................... 320 TB

Thoughts? The above is assuming the 2:1 ratio
 
The tapes state on the box that they are 1.6TB assuming 2:1 ratio. You're suggesting I will only get about 1.2:1 average? So roughly 1TB per tape?
Click to expand...

It is unlikely that you will get 2:1 if you have any already compressed files in your backups (.jpg,.mpg, .zip, .bz2. .7z ...)
 
I would then expect 1.1:1 to 1.3:1 because the zip files will not be compressed again.
 
If these are well compresed files, I would expect .98 to 1.0 actually. Depending on the backup software, sometimes turning on software compression will actually cause you to lose a fractional amount of space because of the attempt at compression of compresed data (plus additional metadata, headers, ecc, etc), and hardware compression witll be an even wash.
 
It also depends on the kind of data you are backing up. I have a LTO1 tape drive and I rarely get any compression for audio/visual media backups. :(
 
NEVER use software compression on an LTO drive. This will totally wipe out all performance. The tape drive compression works at 10 times as fast as most CPUs can well unless you have software that can compress with 8+ cores... My LTO2 drives each compress at 20 to 40 MB/s on a 6 year old Opteron 246 dual procesor system with 4GB of ram.
 
Sayth said:
The tapes state on the box that they are 1.6TB assuming 2:1 ratio. You're suggesting I will only get about 1.2:1 average? So roughly 1TB per tape?

This is my first time working with tapes. The managers bought the equipment under the software manufacturer's recommendation so I have 24 of these tapes at the moment and a Sun SL24 Auto tape loader.

So needless to say, the money is spent, I'm stuck with tape backup. I just need to learn to use them. The guy who recommended the solution said to management, "Well uhuh ya just gotta take out the old tapes and put new ones in every month or so. Then recycle your tapes. uhuh cause I'm a big douche bag and you'll believe whatever I say uhuh." He forgot to mention the hassle of tapes and configuring the backup. So that's where I come in. I was never supposed to be a part of this project. Don't we all love management?

Anyway... I rearranged my plan a little.

Grandfather: Stored offsite. Recycled after 6 months. 120 TB
Father set 1: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 60 TB
Father set 2: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 60 TB
Increment set 1: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 40 TB
Increment set 2: Stored onsite. Recycled every 4 weeks. 40 TB
Total: ......................................................... 320 TB

Thoughts? The above is assuming the 2:1 ratio
Click to expand...

Well if you only have 24 tapes I would still push for a disk based backup system. I just got a quote from Dell for a MD1000 fully loaded with 2tb nearline disks for 10,500 and that will give you 30tb of storage.Of course you would need a cheap server for this but it wouldnt need to cost much 1-2k. This should hold your 20tb with atleast 1 month of differentials and minimize your data loss to 15 minutes. I think the cost of just tapes would approach 10k wouldnt it?

You could then use your existing tape drive and tapes for offsite storage periodically.

Anyhow when you need to restore 20tb worth of data and you get a bad tape or unreadable error or something the disk to disk to tape will look cheap retrospectively.

Hope I gave you some things to think about. Backing up 20tb worth of data can get expensive :p
 
Yeah no kidding. You have no idea what kind of people I'm dealing with here. They know best but then again they wont listen when I say "We should store a backup off site" instead I get "Well our safe is fire and water proof! That's a waste of time!"

Seriously.... I will have to consider your suggestion. They're talking of doubling this project next year so we're gonna have 40TB to deal with. *face-plam*

Thanks for all of your help people! Still open to other suggestions or supportive arguements to help me convince management. There should be a sticky called "Convince management to..."
 
Tapes are pretty cheap these days

i know that LTO4 tapes are about AU $60ex at Disti level

i normally get 1:1 on my tape drive as most of it is Audio/Visual

so if you get 1TB per tape that's a lot cheaper than disc, especially if you are buying IBM/HP branded drives at a 300% mark up (with a lower warranty to boot)
 
If your project will go to 40tb next year and you want to go with a disk to disk to tape solution and have a really tight budget you could build your server off this chassis.
http://www.provantage.com/chenbro-micom-rm91250ml-1620~7CHEN0CQ.htm
It will fit 50 hard disks. I would use 2 disks in raid 1 for the os and get two 24 port raid controllers for the rest. The hitachi 2tb disks have a good reputation in raid arrays and can be found for 130-140 dollars. here is a quick build i was thinking of.
Part Price
Chenbro 50 drive server chassis $2,800
Intel I7 920 CPU $290
SuperMicro Server Motherboard $260
6gb Memory $160
24 port mini sas raid card pci-e $850
(2) 320gb high reliabilty OS drives $119
(24) 2tb Hard Drives $3,840
Slim DVD Burner $40
Server 2008 R2 X64 $659

Total for 48tb Backup Server $9,018

(24) 2tb Hard Drives $3,840
24 port mini sas raid card pci-e $850

Total for 96tb Backup Server $13,708

Add Microsoft DPM for about 500 on the server and 150 per protected server.

Anyway you look at it 14k for 96tb of disk is pretty decent.

I got some quotes from Dell for a dual xeon 5500 series wth 6gb ram. Dual perc 6 controllers for up to 4 md1000 (15 drive) exernal enclosures

Server 3600 dollars
MD1000 with 15 2tb nearline drives (30tb) 10,500

So you could get 30tb now for about 14k from Dell and add on more md1000 when your project gets larger as they always do. Next year they may have 2.5 or 3tb nearline disks available from dell so you could get 45tb in an enclosure next year for perhaps less then 10k as an upgrade.

The dell quotes were after working the price down with a representitive btw so if you build them online they are much more expensive...
 
drescherjm said:
Or just by a $5000 LTO4 autochanger + a $1500 US server and use a network backup program like bacula.

http://www.bacula.org/en/

There is even paid support if that floats your boat.

http://www.baculasystems.com/
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link on that software very interesting I will give it a try.
It seems like the cheapest decent tapes would be about 40 per tape.
So you might get 1tb on a 800gb tape and with the op's tape scheme he'd need 300tb. So 300 tapes would be about 12000 in additional cost of tape with the currently proposed tape scheme. That brings the cost to about 18k?

The op hasnt mentioned what type of data or what the data change rate will be. That could change the strategy considerably depending. Also data archiving policies? Some types of data you only need a recent backup ever not one from 2 years ago (legal reasons or whatnot)
 
I have used that (bacula) for 5 to 6 years to backup about 50 desktops and servers with a mix of windows and linux machines. I currently have 80 LTO2 tapes full and about the same DLT. The best feature of the software is you are never forced to structure your backups to get avoid paying a high licence cost. You can put an autochanger, tape drive or disk storage on any machine(s) that you want. The database can also be on any machine that you want. You never pay for operating system upgrades.

I use a 2 drive 24 slot Exabyte Magnum 224 autochanger and other DLT drives along with a limited amount of disk storage (few 100 GB). My bacula server director (the part the does the scheduling ...) is on a dual processor 248 opteron we bought in 2004 with the main storage (machine with the autochanger) and database on a second system with similar specs. The director (64 bit gentoo linux) is also the main fileserver for the network and has 7TB of raid 5 / 6. All machines are connected together using a gigabit network. There are 5 or so other fileservers that have 4 to 7 TB of raid 5 or 6.
 
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