Backup/Redundancy Questions

[High_Jumbllama]

What brand of tape backup drive and software would some of you recommend? Also, ghosting software for the server. What works with 2K server. This would be ghosting to another drive that if needed would be connected to the exact same port on the motherboard controller. So nothing Funky.

What hot swappable internal raid systems/subsystems would you all recommend? (Drives being in enclosures in 5.25" drive bays. Mirroring is sufficient though the option to go to RAID 5 later would be nice.

Added:
Mirroring would be for two pairs of seperately mirrored drives.

[Fluff]

For SCSI Well Dell seem to use AMI raid controllers. (PERC) . 3ware and Adaptec arent bad either.
Supermicro make hot swop enclosures (3x5.25) .

Not sure how to do ghosting/software mirroring in windows. Havent tried. Linux seems to have this built in.

I have a HP DAT 72 drive at work, it seems to be ok, and using DDS4 tapes (40GB) but will go to larger capacity if needed.
Most people tend to use Veritas software for backups. Apparently ARCserve is a bit harder to use but generally those are the two main options.



Currently speccing up a server for work

Dell Powerdge 1800 Tower Server -
Dual Intel Xeon 4 2.8GHz processor's, 1Gb RAM (2x 512Mb),
2x 73Gb 10,000rpm hard disk's, PERC 4/Di RAID controller,
RAID 1, Dual Power Supplies, CD, FDD.

Which i thought was quite reasonable for a small server for 11 people.

Have a look at iomega rev drives. As they come with Ghost. It could be a quick solution. If all you want to do is create a snapshot for backup. They are alot quicker than tape. No SCSI yet though or hardware compression.

[Wombat]

Re: Tape Drives

How much data are you looking at? How often/fast does it need to be backed up?

[High_Jumbllama]

Originally posted by Wombat
Re: Tape Drives

How much data are you looking at? How often/fast does it need to be backed up?

Daily backups 40GB native would be more than enough. Preferably the drive should be external. USB 2.0 would be simple enough.

@Fluff:
Preferably they would be IDE drives for cost. The boss is finally worrying about backup/redundancy but is still pinching pennies. Getting him to buy a RAID system alone is a miracle.

Edit:
The tape would be for data backup. Actually with raid, I suppose ghosting would not be necessary.

[Kurt]

You should look into Windows2003 and Shadow Copies (i.e. file versioning),

The integrated Windows backup software can backup system state (registry, certificates, iis metabase, etc.).

With Shadow copies and backup, you could spare the price of Veritas (about 900$, mileage may vary) and buy into (at least) RAID 1 arrays (lotsa cheap servers with SATA RAID nowadays).

Ghosting is useful when you've installed the server, then you use it to restore a working config and restore system state with the backup utility - otherwise it's ghosting anytime you change sth.

Tape backup is cheap AND slow. Depending on your backup needs, you might want to reserver a partition on your array just to create a big zip file that you'd then put to tape (so the tape can run at full speed and not take the whole night for a measly 10 GB).

[Taz]

I'd avoid any kind of DAT backup solution, pay the extra for DLT Freecom seem to be selling the VS80 drives at a decent price, this will do 40Gb uncompressed, and the DLT4 tapes it uses are reasonably cheap these days.

For the price of a hard disk you could get a RAID controller, something like the Promise FastTrak SX4060. Setup RAID 5 that would give you the same amount of storage as two mirrored pairs.

[The Rock]

Originally posted by Taz
I'd avoid any kind of DAT backup solution, pay the extra for DLT Freecom seem to be selling the VS80 drives at a decent price, this will do 40Gb uncompressed, and the DLT4 tapes it uses are reasonably cheap these days.

I wholeheartedly concur. DAT tapes suck, they are NOT reliable AT ALL. DLTs can be written to thousands of times and not even blink. Very reliable media, much more so than DAT or optical media. I'm in backup and recovery, and I curse the fool who invented DATs.

[Paddy]

[insert the voice of MR T.]I pitty the foo..[/quote]

[Taz]

Originally posted by The Rock
...and I curse the fool who invented DATs.

I wouldn't be so hard on them, they invented DAT for audio use not as a backup medium