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How do you backup?

D

DistributedBen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 26, 2004
Messages
227
For the past few years we have been backing up our files, system and exchange to external firewire drives. We have 2 external drives we rotate each day and take one off-site each day. I've always been a little worried about the wear and tear put on the drives by moving them back and forth each day. Yesterday one of the drives refused to show up when plugged in. I was planning on only taking one drive home once a week, but it failed before I could start.

I'm thinking that there has to be a more effiecient backup strategy. I'm thinking of having daily backups be made to a different server or NAS, and then once a week backing up to removable drive that I can take home once a week.

I was curious about how others who do offsite backups go about it.

Thanks,
Ben
 
Tape drives on a nighly schedule with the previous days tape taken off site.
 
Symantec LiveState Recovery.. Desktop 3.0

It works pretty well, trips after everyone goes home, lasts about 10 minutes for a big HD... everyone's happy.
 
Yeah I would say that while your method isn't aweful, it could be improved on.

I don't know how much you backup, but I would highly recommend a tape solution. LTO2 drives are relatively cheap now and hold 200GB of uncompressed data.

That way you can have multiple tapes for lets say mon-fri

personally I have LTO2 drives with the following tape schedule in BackupExec

mon-fri tapes , 3 friday tapes for week1/2/3 , then 12 monthly tapes (week4 for each month)

This way I have 12 months of full backups , 3 past weeks of "weekly" backups and 4 last days of full backups.
 
Current:
Backup Exec
Tape drives - tapes taken offsite twice weekly. (DLT-IV). Working set 14 days during the week, full on weekends.

Daily backup to disk (midday, files changed that day).

Full backup archived monthly.

Future:
Backup Exec Continuous Protection Server -> Disk/SAN. Replicated via private fiber to offsite storage host.

LTO-3 Monthly Archive.
 
Thanks for the info so far.

Right now we are only backing up about 30GB of compressed data a night. We use Vertias Exec. Since it isn't much data and goes fast, we run a full backup each night.

I do like the easy of tape, but they are expensive. I will look into those drives you mentioned.
 
file servers -
nightly incremental using ADSM, most recent tapes taken offsite nightly.
Friday night - full system backup to AIT tapes, taken offsite monday morning.
 
We do nightly backups with Tivoli. Tapes not being currently used in the library are off-site.
 
DistributedBen said:
Thanks for the info so far.

Right now we are only backing up about 30GB of compressed data a night. We use Vertias Exec. Since it isn't much data and goes fast, we run a full backup each night.

I do like the easy of tape, but they are expensive. I will look into those drives you mentioned.
Click to expand...

if you only have 30GB then look at LTO1 drives if you can find any, they are now considered "old" although it's the same technology as LTO2 or LTO3 , I'd recommend some older tape technologies as well but you really don't want to get some old DAT autoloader in 2006 , lol

data protection is never expensive, beat that into your company owner's head!!!

LTO1 would give you 100 of uncompressed data, IMHO doing compression is a waste, so look for some media that will give you about 3x the needed space for future growth, at least that's my rule of thumb and in this case LTO1 would fit your needs pretty well.
 
We use some special software that backs up all our data and our SQL and Exchange database every night automatically. I tried it out a few months ago and love it.

It backs up over a 128-bit encryption to a server in Tempe, Arizona and then it is replicated in real time to another server in a completley different city.

I had to do a recovery a few weeks back for a user and using their software it took about 20 minutes. I don't want to spam the forum so if anyone wants to try out the software we use, PM me and I will send you the link of the company.
 
zrac said:
I don't know how much you backup, but I would highly recommend a tape solution. LTO2 drives are relatively cheap now and hold 200GB of uncompressed data.
Click to expand...

I was surprised to see how much LTO2 drives have come down recently. We bought a LTO3 (Dell) in June and at the time of purchase the 2's were only a few dollars cheaper - and I do mean just a few. Their web site price for a 2 now is ~1500.
 
You can pick them up even cheaper on eBay. I just bought this

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110028764356

got it installed and running yesterday. Five hundred for a 9 tape LTO1 autoloader is stupid cheap. Thats 900GB uncompressed and I can upgrade to LTO 2 if I need to expand further. I'm going to just about spend more on a couple of sets of tapes. For what the OP needs though a standalone DLT IV drive would even work fine as thats 40GB uncompressed and DLT IV is dirt cheap nowadays. Hell - I've got a coupel of DLT IV loaders around here that I do not even use any more. The newer DLT IV drives are the VS80 model which are the same size as a CD-ROM drive - those will cost a few hundred though. Serach eBay for DLT drive and then for DLT tapes. With only 30GB compressed you could get a hlfway decent older DLT setup going for a couple of hundred bucks.
 
As an eBay Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Yup, plus I swear by the technology, I have hundreds of TB that went on some tapes and tapes have 0 issues whatsoever, I have cleaned some of my drives once since I bought them years ago and no problems at all

it is just a very reliable technology and like you said, LTO2 dropped in price pretty good, but generally I would think LTO1 drive would last them few years.

Only issue I see is that at 30GB you are barely backing up anything, so lets say the management gets the idea of using Solidworks/Autocad/Catia or something and all of a sudden your engineers pile up another 60GB in 1 year, or the owner decides to bring his 80GB collection of mp3's to work for safe keeping... that sort of thing, it is very easy for some upcoming project to raise your needs from 30GB to way over 100GB, hence why I suggested LTO2 just to be safe, cost won't be that much and you can use it for the next 5-7 years
 
I agree. In the past few years we have ramped up our tech usage, and I only seeing growing. I work for a school, and more and more is getting on the computers. The increase in multimedia files has increased a ton since just last year.

Our application server does have an AIT1 35/90GB drive in it that we use for our application specific backups. I do like the tapes. Never had a problem and easily portable.

How much data can one of the drives you mentioned (LT01, etc) backup per hour?
 
LTO Transfer rates are pretty speedy. Of course ideally you would have a dedicated HBA rated for the drives speed with no other devices on the same SCSI channel. The below rates are compressed so stick with the lower number for uncompressed.

Ultrium 1 provides for data transfer rates of 15-30 MB/ second (2:1 compression) for the first generation of the 8-channel version.

Ultrium 2 provides for data transfer rates of 30-60 MB/ second (2:1 compression) for the first generation of the 8-channel version.

Ultrium 3 provides for data transfer rates of 68-136 MB/ second (2:1 compression).

Based on LTO1 technology - at 30GB of data - with compression at 2:1 you could back up that entire volume in roughly 15 to 20 minutes. With write verify on and time for compression I'd guess it would back it up in under an hour. This is also counting you are not needing to use Open FIle Options, database connections, etc.
 
Double capacity per tape for each step up. Double the cost too...

Native/2:1 Compressed Capacity

LTO1 is 100/200GB
LTO2 is 200/400GB
LTO3 is 400/800GB
 
LTO1 : 100GB Native/ 200GB compressed

LTO2: 200GB/400GB

LTO3: 400GB/800GB

Keep in mind the value for compressed is theoretical. In reality you will get less. On our NAS we're lucky if we get compression equal to 1.5x native. Of course, with 30gigs, shouldn't be an issue, but still you want room to grow because tape drives still arn't cheap. ;)

Edit: Eh Mix beat me.
 
You have to figure out what you're backing up, if it would be local resources from within the server then variables like HDD speed , backplane , RAID , bus speed etc... all come into play.

On my HP ML370 boxes with 10k rpm SCSI drives in Raid 5 I get the following rates with a certance CL400 drive (LTO2) , I think certance is now owned by seagate by the way.

Local resources :

116GB of various sized files, from multimedia to text files , 1175MB/minute

LAN resources :

60GB of an exchange information store , 660MB/min , but from other servers I get about the same.

obviously WAN speeds depend on your links, I have T1's so it's nothing extraordinary.

Those are real world numbers with good hardware used on server,tape drive and network.

You are looking at maybe 30 minute backup job max
 
At Work we have a Backup server with 2.5T of SCSI Storage plus a Tape Backup system that holds 7 200-400GB Tapes. We run full backup nights, also have a week, month, year backup's as well. One copy of the tapes are kept onsite in our vault, the other's i take off site. We also have one of the biggest battery backup's i've seen. It holds 32 car battiers and can run our entire operation for a few hours.
Home i use a external HDD and use Iomega backup software and i also ghost my drive's to a 500 GB eternal backup drive.
 
For file backups we use EMC Retrospect and backup daily to a 1.0TB Buffalo Terastation that is located at the opposite end of the building in the warehouse. Then once a week that Terastation does a complete backup to another Terastation at our branch in Alabama.

Our database is backed up to tape nightly and taken offsite. After our end of month processing is complete, we make a backup tape and store it permanently offsite.
 
2 data centers, one in the states one in Britain. Both server centers are a replicate of the other, with both sites doing offsite tapes daily.
I have no idea what type of tapes they use as Im in eastern europe, and all our data goes to them...
 
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