Tape Backups?

[prepressdork]

Need some advice: I have a much older Mac (mirrored drive door) with Retrospect 6 and OS 10.4 that is used to archive customer files. Attached is a DAT drive. An upgrade is obviously long overdue. Getting a new(er) Mac and a newer Retrospect is no problem but the tape drive has a Centronics SCSI connection. I asked Retrospect about a SCSI to USB adapter and they said there are issues with using one (anyone using an adapter?).

Given newer technologies, I'm not sure of how to proceed. I'd like to keep a desktop tape backup solution in place so any kind of SAN/NAS or cloud solution is out. What are others using for their local archiving solution?

Thanks,
pd

 

[Chasfinch]

We use a multiple redundant RAIDs. I think its called a 50 ( 2 raid 5s mirrored) and a 24 hour backup also. the mirroring are on 2 different RAID boxes and the 24 hour is a partition of 1. Only thing we have not done is a cloud backup for offsite redundancy. The only reason is that I have not had time to clean up old files and separate it out to keep the cost down.

 

[mwc]

My ramble...

If you are just archiving customer files....
I use retrospect....but not above version 6......we never really used retrospect for incremental or workstation backups.
I (ALSO) have a Retro6 machine, OS 10.4.1. mac with a Firewire AIT-2 drive. It is ONLY used when pulling data older than 2011. ALL backups since have been to rotating Hardrives (using a drive dock/toaster thingy).
A 2Tb Hd is MUCH cheaper than the tapes we were using, and much faster. (we have even pulled some previous years archives from Tape to Drive just to avoid using the Tape Drive as much as possible.
I copy the data to two different drives (A and B) for redundancy.
I would never go back to tape (for our shop) - just too costly (i.e. - what happens when that old SCSI tape drive takes the last breath? you are going to spend $$$ either getting it fixed of finding an old one that works with your tapes....with the drive/dock method, I can get my data from ANYPLACE I can mount a drive.

If you are looking for incremental machine backups...
Time Machine on recent macs is great...using external drives on each station, or a NAS...like Apples TIME CAPSULE base stations.
For Cloud backup (or to externals,also), I REALLY like CrashPlan.

or, if you are bent on using tape...I think you would have to spend the $$$ for a drive with a USB or FW bridge built in. A SCSI to ??? adaptor seem to be 'iffy'...look for ones that retrospect lists support for in their recent versions - Retrospect - (wow, just looked...didn't know retrospect made it to 11, so far <insert spinal tap joke></insert spinal tap joke>)

 

[buckeye]

I have used DAT, DLT and AIT tapes for archiving and will probably never go back to tapes. Our Overland backup storage device started acting flaky AND the tapes themselves would far too often become unreliable. We currently are archiving to external 3TB drives using Veritas and are also copying to two different drives for the redundancy. It's hard to beat the price and the time difference of pulling the data off of an external drive compared to tapes.

Erik

 

[JimBob53]

In our shop we use a large capacity auxiliary drive attached to each computer with automatic back up daily feature... only the job data is backed up.

 

[mattbeals]

Switch to LTO5 or some sort of disk based solution. The data on the DAT drives may not be accessible much longer if you can't find a DAT drive to use. I use an RDX drive with my Dell servers. It's really just a laptop hard drive in a removable cartridge. Works very well.

DAT is long dead, migrate before it's too late.

 

[prepressdork]

Hi Matt. My reseller mentioned RDX just yesterday. Question: does RDX work like a regular hard drive that you can copy/paste data to the disk (via Windows Explorer) or is some sort of backup software necessary?

 

[mattbeals]

Hi Matt. My reseller mentioned RDX just yesterday. Question: does RDX work like a regular hard drive that you can copy/paste data to the disk (via Windows Explorer) or is some sort of backup software necessary?

Yes, mounts like a regular volume.

 

[prepressdork]

Hmmmmm. So, we've kind of come full circle back to the days so SyQuest, Zip, etc. Kind of............

 

[mattbeals]

Hmmmmm. So, we've kind of come full circle back to the days so SyQuest, Zip, etc. Kind of............

Kind of, but these aren't intended to be swapped like we did with SyQuest, Bernoulli's, Zip's, etc.

External SATA (eSATA) drives may be faster/easier. Your mileage may vary.

 

[swain84]

From my opinion you can check CloudBacko Pro for backup your servers, databases, and workstations. CloudBacko Pro is one of the fastest cloud, online, offsite, remote, local backup software available in the market because of its built-in speed boosting technologies, e.g. multi-thread, In-File Delta block-level incremental backup, configurable compression, etc. For example, backing up a 500GB Microsoft Exchange Server EDB or a 1TB VMware ESXi virtual machine to the cloud can be easily finished overnight

 

[MailGuru]

External data is soooooo cheap now, it's rediculous. You can buy 2 - 3 terabyte stand-alone hard drives for less than $199. They mount and address just like your normal drives (map it and assign it a name like E:\, F:\, G:\, etc.) Copy to and from using standard windows drag & drop, or, create your own batch file commands.

We use alternating 2-terabyte removable drives for weekly back-up (one is always kept off-site and brought in and swapped out every Monday).

We have a replicating server that will kick in if the primary server goes down, as well as a backup (server-to-server) copy (that's 3 servers: a primary, a replicating, and a back-up server) along with the offsite removable alternating drives. We are also entertaining a current proposal for cloud backup as part of our business continuity plan (in the event that a catastrophic event leveled the whole building, we would be able to set up an alternate site and still access our data and art).

All of this, is probably cheaper than backup to DAT drives in the long run. As technology becomes obsoleted, it will become near impossible to even buy the exchange media (have you tried to buy any floppies lately?)

-Best

MailGuru