Need a new backup/archive procedure

C

Chiggy

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 23, 2003
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Up to now, the company I work for has just backed up peoples stuff for a month then recycled the external harddrives. Well they want to now archive everything. We use Retrospect software now and it kind of sucks, so I am looking into getting something totally new. I need new software and new hardware. The CEO said he wants everything written to tapes weekly....is that really worth it? I was thinking writing to tapes once a month. What does everyone use hardware and software wise. I want to get a new dedicated box for backups. (Right now it is on the same box as a Domain controller :eek: ) Any suggestions on what I should look into? Are tapes cost effective? Stick to external harddrives? We back up about 120 gigs a week.
 
tapes are more trouble than they are worth. They simply are not scaling well with the dataset most people are working with. I back up about 200gigs weekly. Were I to shoot that to tape, it'd take *days* to write out and retrieve. How useful is that, do you suppose? Say you lose everything excepting the tape drive. Do most companies had a couple days to spare while the tech pulls the data off the tapes?

No, they don't. The alternative is to get a very high end tape drive and tapes, but then the costs start reaching the "HOLY SHIT" levels, and you are better off hiring monkeys from the local zoo to bang on some typewriters in an attempt to get your data back.

But I digress.

The ideal backup solution as far as I'm concerned are several dedicated servers. Two at least, each with their own raid 1 arrays ( Preferably on their own controllers ), seperated to different physical locations. They both would store the same data set. This is along with a "live" backup set stored on the file server, which itself has a raid 5 array.

That sounds like a lot, and it is. But it's still cheaper than the tape drives you may run across.
 
Most Entry-Mid level tape set ups are crap. If you want anything better, be prepaired to pay much. What I do is use Windows Backup (NTBackup) to run nightly backups to a Windows file server. That server get backed up nightly to tape. Is the best solution I have found for our needs. I also use Volume Shadow Copy on servers where users store data. I retrieve from that if a file gets delete/corrupted/etc.
 
What size is your current daily backup? I see you mentioned 120 gigs/week..but your full nightly backup is___? (I don't do incremental backups..each daily is a full one)

For entry to medium size backups...I've been increasingly disappointed in the reliability of tapes...IMO since they went to 20/40 size..they pushed their limits. What I have begun to love over the past year..is Iomega's REV drives. Especially the internal SCSI ones..VERY fast, inexpensive drives, and rock solid durable. 35/90 capacity.
 
So I looked more into how much we are actually backing up and how we do it. First day of the week it take a snapshot of the users profile and copies it over (to a 250gb external drive) Then each day it incrementally adds what the user adds to there profile, so that is on average 500kb. By the end of the week the harddrive has about 210GB on it. Our policy of what we back up is a little old so some of the newer music file type and video file types slip threw so if that gets updated with the new system it will probably cut off around 20GB. :eek: Mind you 50GB of this is our shared server and other misc servers. So I guess tapes aren't the way to go. Currently we right to tapes every 3 months and it sucks.
 
Timely for me, so here's our deal:

We currently use NTbackup to a LTO1 tape. We're starting to far exceed the 200GB limit of that, so we're planning to buy a LTO3 drive this month (yes, it's going to be around $4000). We're also setting up a USB HDD that we will use a scheduled job to make a backup over the weekend. The HDD will provide much faster file recovery in the event that someone deletes something important (as well as being a backup to the backup), with the LTO3 providing reliable long term storage that is easily archivable.
 
Baredor said:
Timely for me, so here's our deal:

We currently use NTbackup to a LTO1 tape. We're starting to far exceed the 200GB limit of that, so we're planning to buy a LTO3 drive this month (yes, it's going to be around $4000). We're also setting up a USB HDD that we will use a scheduled job to make a backup over the weekend. The HDD will provide much faster file recovery in the event that someone deletes something important (as well as being a backup to the backup), with the LTO3 providing reliable long term storage that is easily archivable.
Click to expand...


Correct, it usually matters how much your backing up a day or so and what kind of tapes would provide that storage, Baredor here, probably backs up a shitload of gigs everyday thus his need for the huge tapes. I think the best solution is a nice NAS and tape hybird where tapes are moved offsite and long term storage (monthly or weekly) while the NAS handles the daily...your call. It's always a mix of straws when you're talking about backup...some prefer hardrives and others swear by tapes. I believe the best solution is both but would recommend external hard drives for the cheap and nice tape backups for the investor. Currently most large companies that i was contracted for used tapes. Smaller companies used hard drives..
 
XOR != OR said:
tapes are more trouble than they are worth. They simply are not scaling well with the dataset most people are working with. I back up about 200gigs weekly. Were I to shoot that to tape, it'd take *days* to write out and retrieve. How useful is that, do you suppose? Say you lose everything excepting the tape drive. Do most companies had a couple days to spare while the tech pulls the data off the tapes?
Click to expand...

What kind of tape drives are you using that take days to write 200GB of data? We use Exabyte VXA drives often for our clients, and just today while troubleshooting a backup issue I ran a 75GB backup in a little over 2 hours. We have most of our clients setup to do full backups nightly. We had been running a full backup on Friday and then differentials the rest of the week, but then we had a client's server crash on a Thursday and the tape we were restoring from snapped about 5 minutes into the restore and they lost a weeks worth of work. Luckily it didn't hurt them much but after that we transitioned into fulls every night where possible.
 
So here is kind of what I am thinking. Getting a new box, lots of memory with like 400GB Raid 1, then write to tapes maybe every two weeks, then recycle the harddrives. Any recomendations on what type of tape drive and tapes to use when archiving about 300-350GB of data?
 
I would go with LTO if you can afford it. LTO2 drives can do 200GB/400GB compressed, while LTO3 does 400GB/800GB compressed. Plus, if Dell's web site is any indication, LTO3s are barely more expensive - and I do mean just a few dollars. But remember we are talking $3-4K+ here. I'm most definitely not a tape expert but I don't know of anything else that can do that capacity on a single tape. Plus, LTO3 is blazing fast:

Wikipedia said:
At the full native data rate (80 MB/sec), LTO-3 drives can write data faster than any single hard disk drive can read. Even the minimum streaming data rate (~30-40 MB/sec) is faster than many hard disk drives.
Click to expand...

I don't remember bus speeds off the top of my head, so I'm not sure what kind of controller you will need to hit that though. Just something to consider.

Not to mind your business, but you might consider going to tape more than twice a month simply for the purpose of offsite storage, unless you're doing that already with a HDD.
 
Well the reason I was thinking twice a month to tape was to 1.) Reduce the amount of tapes 2.) Say I need to restore a file from last week I wont have to restore the tapes to get to the one file. Unfortunatly are archiving wont be just for archiving. We would need to write to tapes twice...once to send offsite and one to leave here for file restoration. Unless there is a better way?
 
I would also continue to backup to a USB/Firewire HDD - at least once a week. (We're running tape M-F with our USB programmed to run Sat night.) Then you can do a restore from the HDD in the event someone deletes their file. Much faster than getting it off of tape, but should you ever have a problem with the disk, you can get it from the tape given some time.

Edit for clarity:

Regarding writing to tapes twice, here is what we do: Night shift starts the backup, and usually leaves before it is finished. He takes LAST night's tape home with him. He brings it back when he comes in the following evening. The cycle repeats.

As you can see, this means that last night's tape is always here in the office should we need to recover something from it. Now, that does leave us open to the possibility of losing one day's data in the event of a fire/tornado/whatever, but it is a calculated risk for the benefit. Obviously you should be able to judge whether or not, given some disaster, you would be able to snag the tape while you gtfo. :p
 
Wow ok so looking at our backup procedure it seems that we are kinda in a fucked up position. I recently started with this company as their IT Manager, granted I am the only IT person for a 7 person company but their back seemed kinda screwy to me when I started last month. So what happens is we have three servers: 1. is FTP/Exchange/SQL server, 2. is FaxServer, 3. is our NAS with a Raid 5 array. Everyones profiles are backed up to the NAS when the log off at the end of the day and is backed up to an external HDD during lunch that is taken offsite by me everyday, the Fax Server has an automated backup that happens every night to the NAS as well as our web hosting company in SF. The NTserver is backed up to 2 tapes daily and also backed up to SF I believe. I know there is a better way for this to take place but I just am not sure how to set it up.
 
So now that I have a better grasp on how I should store the data....I started to look for a better server/client to get the info from each persons PC. What is a good application that has a client that runs on each persons PC and then on the server I can create groups and have them scheduled for diffrent times. A lot of the backup software I have seen is for large file servers not individual PCs.
 
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