BlkKnight

Hi All,

It's been a while since I've speced a new server.

We have about 250gb of data to backup. I was thinking of a 200/400 LTO drive + Tapes.

I still intend to use automated NT Backup scripts on a 12 Disk rotation.

But am now thinking of using (Caddied) removable hard disks.

The speed, cost & Reliability benefits of modern disks are swaying me towards that option.

What are your thoughts on this?

darlodge

I'm a big fan of LTO media. The cheapest LTO4 unit I have seen was £1000 and tapes are >£30 each.

Tapes do have a live span though so you will need to replace them at some stage depending on how often they get used.

Does NT backup offer any form of encryption? Are you planning on doing a month end Full backup? My concern would be that a month is to far to restore data from.

Darren

BlkKnight

Mon-Thurs - Daily Full Backup - on a two week rotation.
Friday - Daily Full Backup - On a 4 week rotation, taken off-site

NT Backup can have a flag to only restore if the Admin User name & Password are correct. Security isn't really a problem tho, as it's a small family run operation.

darlodge

You plan sounds good to me. You could always add additional tapes for month end in future.

For ease I'd say tapes. A users can come in Monday morning and insert a tape. The backup runs over night and then they come in Tuesday take the tape out and start again.

If you go with Disks the user will have to manually eject the drive (green arrow in sys tray).

Couple of questions with Disks

What happens if a USB key is plugged into the server and takes the drive assignment and then the Disk is on the wrong letter. Will the backup fail?

My other concern with Disks is what if someone takes the external Disk home and tries to grab a file from it and overwrites the data? Now your backup routine is out of whack.

Darren

BlkKnight

With the disks in Caddies - they can be added & removed just as tapes.

You don't have to "stop the disk" via sys tray - as the device can be unmounted at the end of the backup script by command line.

USB Disk - not going to happen as in secure area.

No one will be taking the disk home - besides, NT Backup is a single "big" file - not individual files.

ChrisB

Have you looked at the RDX kit? HP, IBM et al are all pushing it now, so it looks like DDS is dead (hurrah!). Only scales to 300GB (native) at the moment though

RDX

They have some interesting looking other kit which uses RDX:

ProStor Systems

HHxx

Probably overkill but I am a fan of d2d2t.

Disk space is so cheap now You can vault a set to tape, sync it with a remote server...

A lot of backup software are starting to offer dedupe, save loads of space

Jonnys3

We use Symantec Netbackup 6.5 at work - it is the best backup software available: cross-platform backups, bare metal restore, de-dupe, d2d, d2d2t, encryption, enterprise vault, TSU/DSUs etc - but then we have a HA enterprise environment with 30+ TB's of data to protect

I would suggest Symantec BackupExec with a single LTO4 tape drive for your situation. The actual backup cycle is obviously dependant on the business' data retention policy and any business conitinuity strategy in place.