20-30 gig backup ideas

kilowatt

kilowatt

mach-o mach-o man
If you had to backup 20 to 30 gigs of unique data every week to a removable format, what would it be?

Has to last a long time (over 10 years, climate-controlled, of course), has to be compatible with Mac OS X (scsi, sata, or firewire connected), cart's can't cost more than $50

So, any ideas?

Thanks!
 
Does it have to be on seperated or could you just back it up all to one place each week? For instance, I do nightly backups to a 250GB external harddrive I have.

Other than that, your $50 price limit could be pushing it. And I'm assuming that's $50 per backup?
 
If you don't need to keep the backed up data for more than a week or two, external hard drives could be the answer. Buy 5 of them and rotate them during the week.

Or invest some cash up-front and get a decent tape system like DLT or something.
 
Well, the data has to be archived for years, which is why I didn't swing for a set of hard drives. And yeah, I can't delete previous backups.

I'm looking at DLT drives at the moment, but I'm wondering what alternatives exist.
 
Iomega makes the REV Drives. 35GB uncompressed (70GB compressed on a Mac, 90GB compressed on a PC) per cartridge. Cartridge Shelf-life is >30 years. Cartridges are $60/ea if bought singularly, $50/ea if bought in packs of 4 (from Iomega store); $55/ea if bought singularly, $47.50/ea if bought in packs of 4 (from CDW).
 
$579 for the Iomega burner and 6 disks is pretty hefty. You could get a couple of good external HDs with more space for less than that total.

That said, under $50 doesn't sound very likely unless you're going to spend lots of time burning dvds of backed up stuff.
 
$579 for the drive and some media isn't bad at all, compared with a new DLT system (which can easily cost over $1,000).

My only question would be, how reliable are these things - its basically the inside of a hard drive, minus the heads, right?
 
With the exception of the ZIP drive, I found every piece of IOMega hardware to be of questionable quality. I used to work in a service center and we saw an inodinant number of IOMega tape drives and especially Jazz drives (and that other drive with the little lever and hard plastic cartridge - forget the name now) come back, usually with really bad problems. It kind of soured me against using their hardware in any "real" system or situation.

$.02
 
um. spanned data onto DVD+/-Rs?
DLT (get's kinda expensive though, tapes are $100 each here in Aus.)
um. Zip/Stuffit/TarGzipped archives backed up onto network RAID storage, and then backed up daily onto rotating tape/dvd/hdd..

20-30Gb of data every week is quite a bit.. as much as it's "old" technology i'd be guessing DLT is the way to go. Just make sure your drive is kept in good repair. I work in an educational institute with 8 campuses (well.. 35ish now that we're all joined into TAFE SA and we've had easily half a dozen drives fail recently.. it seems this was mostly caused by bad tapes.. so if you get a quality unit, and quality tapes used once only (except for restores obviously) then you should be ok..
 
What data is going to be placed on this backup? I'm assuming if its being backed up, that you might find it vital? :)

Having gone through months of disaster recovery planning, depending on your usage and environment will dictate what they will find as acceptable for backup. Remember there is only one reason for backup and that is restoration. If you use a fairly non-mainstream media source now, what are your odds that you'll be able to find a replacement drive in 10 years to restore from, if need be, if you don't migrate that data off to a more mainstream media type.

For example, I looked at sait drives during my research, but decided to go with the more popular LTO2, not because the technology is better, or even more cost effective, but simply because more people are using it, which will make it easier to get support. Go back to VHS vs Beta and apply that argument to this one. :)

For the amount of data your trying to move, you can really use almost anything, which gives you tons of options. The idea of DLT or SDLT isn't a bad idea. I used SDLT for a long time and, again, its a widely used tape media. You do, then, have the cost of getting that data to the tape itself, as OS X doesn't have any built in tape drivers. For an environment of that size, I'd recommend BRU by Tolis Group. It scales pretty well and has some very nice command line tools. Licensing isn't very expensive and I would prefer it over a smaller, possibly cheaper alternative because of the support and stability of Tolis Group...you know they'll be around, in theory, longer than a unknown. You'll find that many drives actually ship with a BRU license, so that'll save you some cash right there! :)

If you want to read more about it, grab the documentation from my site. I have to update the BRU section, though. When I originally had to have the doc done, I wasn't able to get the new version of BRU to run with the new tape device I had just received. When I revisited it, that all changed and I'm backing up about 2TB with it on average. :) My site's in my sig, just click on the Projects tab...the mirror should be faster to get the PDF, if you're interested.
 
Thanks Chornbe. :)

My server's being pushed for the last three weeks since I released the doc and I've had some pretty interesting hits in the logs ;)

I tried to be fair and unbiased. I also didn't want to bash any product. I'm sure you can tell I was less than thrilled with my overall experience with TSM, but its not a bad product, it just didn't work out for me, probably due to the engineering group I worked with, who will remain nameless. Each one of those products can address a different need, market and data size, with some nice overlap.

It took forever and a day to get all that info together, so I'm glad folks are enjoying it! :)
 
This thread raises some interesting questions about what we back up and how safe it really is.

I have used pretty much every kind of storage there is out there over the years in one form or another... Floppies (the big and small ones), HD, CD, DVD, DVD-RAM (those cartridge suckers), Zip, Jazz, Syquest, Bernoullis (still got a few of the carts), tape backups of all kinds, etc. Anyone remember the days of using cassette tape drives? Any of those still around? lol.

but I never really put much thought into whether it was going to be around in say 5 or 10 years. In most cases for me, the media is still around but the drives for it arent.

At points during my computerlife, I have moved some of my old content worth saving to new media, including moving zip and jaz to CDs, moving CDs to DVDs, etc. That doesnt include the hundreds and hundreds of floppies I no longer can use in any mac. (I use mediafour's macdrive on my PC for this and it works nicely.) I dare to say that 1 out of every 4 of my floppies is bad in some spot.

What about all of those CDs we backed up 5-10 years ago that we wrote on with a magic marker. Or the tapes that have sat unused and have possibly become brittle.

Is there really a truly reliable source for safe long term (10-30 year) backup that is consumer friendly? Or can only those who are dead serious about backups lasting afford it?

Just some thoughts.
 
DVDs seem to be the shiney new favorite for long term. For me, I just make sure I've always got another system running in my house and run my backups to that. The office is another story, but at home, I run machine-to-machine rsyncs (or the like) and periodically burn a dvd (CDs in earlier days) and toss it in the car. It's not fool proof, but in the 5-6 years I've lost darn little data... even thru' two major system crashes (both brand-name Win PCs - go figger).

So that's something.
 
I have another alternative altogether....one thing for sure is the hard drive is going to be arond for a while longer. I have started using a low cost raid5 backup solution. I have two 1TB systems that mirror to each other everynight. This gives me the redundancy of raid5 PLUS the redundancy of it mirroring to the other system off-site. Each system costs me about $1200. So the math says thats $1.20 per GB. That fits into the original poster's cost analysis. If you are interested the product is known as REBYTE. (www.rebyte.com) and I have found them to be pretty cool.

My .02
 
Hmmm....a programmer? I'm not that big of a company on my own, but send me an email, I don't mind referring out jobs that may come my way. :)

There are multiple considerations here:

1. Do you want your backup to be offsite, in case of disaster?
2. What is your rotation of media going to be? Is it going to be 10 years and down?
3. Are you considering any data growth?

Media such as DVDs and CDs aren't going anywhere for quite sometime, so for the average user, it'll work. If your considering 30GB/week for 10 years, that's a lot of DVD's to keep track of and mind you, if your just simply going to do this by hand, you don't really have a cataloging system in the background to keep track of your data for restoration purposes.

Again, I'll repeat:

The whole point of backup is restoration! :)
 
Go3iverson said:
The whole point of backup is restoration! :)
Click to expand...

The backup process enables recovery, conservation, and archiving. Restoration is only really essential to recovery. ;)
 
I think he's thinking along the lines, if you can't restore from a backup then your backup is useless. Picking a long-term backup strategy is not a game for the cavalier. It's probably one of the least aggressive technology segments out there... in the big-money corporate world, for the sole purpose of backward compatibility (at least in read-back mode).

When people start using phrases like "yeah, just toss all that onto a tape for me" then you'll know you have standards and reliability in inter-system operation. Until then, when you think universal and inter-platform, people think CD and DVD.

That's why companies like IOMega couldn't ever make it the long-term corporate DR market segment. Companies... especially ones that have lived thru' a major system outage... know that what was backed up yesterday had *BETTER* be restorable today. Extrapolate that out over a 3-5 year time span.

Name one retail tape drive or low-end tape drive technology that was standardized, fast and which was left alone without 10000 revisions, updates and media changes, in the last 10 years. I can think of only one... QIC-40; which is now so horribly undersized as to be completely useless in today's market.

$.02
 
aicul said:
The backup process enables recovery, conservation, and archiving. Restoration is only really essential to recovery. ;)
Click to expand...

:)

Yes, but if you put all of your archives and backups (conservation) onto media that you cannot restore from, what good is it to you? ;)

The real bottom line is the ability to access the data over a specific given period of time. If its your archive, you'll need to know you can easily access that data in X-months or X-years when you need the data again. If its your backup and your system goes out, you need to know you can get back up and running ASAP in an emergency. It really doesn't matter what the task is called, it really is a form of restoration. Most people won't 'work' from their backups directly. They'll want to keep the integrity of the backup and the state of the data of that given point in time, so they'll restore the data to another machine to access it.

The real keys that people overlook are all linked together. Its the ability to properly restore the data. You'd be shocked how many folks just assume the data is safe. Secondly, is the use of a catalog. That's where true backups are handy, in that they will keep track of versions and dates for you, of your data and also can help you save space, by allowing differential/incremental backups, instead of continual, in this case, 30GB backups, unless that's just the size of data growth.
 
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