Backups-Cheap IDE Drives as Alternative to Tapes? 17
3107813 asks: "Are large IDE drives a good alternative to tapes for backing up a server? I have a server with about 40GB of storage that I backup nightly. I have a tape rotation and end up saving the monthly tapes in case someone comes back and wants a file they messed up. Could I replace the tape system with large cheap ide drives?" The thing that makes tape popular as a backup medium is due to the fact that they are portable. Now that IDE drives are becoming cheaper and smaller, would something like this be practical?
Well (Score:1)
Timothy
timothy@monkey.org
Use ADSM for Best of Disk and Tape (Score:1)
IBM (now Tivoli) has a wonderful product called ADSM (now TSM) [tivoli.com]. It backs up data from the client to a disk storage pool. It then migrates that information from disk to tape while, optionally, leaving a copy on disk.
This gives you the advantages of doing fast backups and restores (from disk) while giving you the off site options of tape.
It ain't cheaper than just writing it to disk, of course, but if the data is worth backing up, it's worth keeping safe, right?
InitZero
Offsite still a must. (Score:1)
I maintain a backup/archive server on my home network. All backups are made to it, then I put the backups on tape at my leisure. I have scripts to automate the backups. Copying from drive to drive over a 100mbps network goes quickly. I see about 2.2MBytes/sec backup rate over the network. This may not be fast enough to backup 40GBytes with out doing incrementals. One tweek I did do to make my backups go faster is set the priority level of the NFS deamons higher. On my backup archive server there is about 8.5G of archives that need to be backed up. That goes much faster. The main limiter there is the speed I can write to the backup HD. I can saturate it as I'm moving data from two SCSI disks to an IDE.
My recomendation would be to use a RAID IDE controller on the server it's self, and do a direct backup to it each night. Then write that to tape just after the backup is finished. The tape then goes to your offsite backup location. Your onsite backup is the contents on the RAID. Set it up so you switch between two or more partitions. Yesterday's backup is on partition 1. Tonights will go to partition 2. Tomarrow's backup will go to partition 1.
Re:as long as the drives last (Score:1)
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
IDE Backup Drives (Score:1)
Home, OK...work, not (Score:1)
But this is unacceptable for a business. For a lot of businesses, the data IS the business. Recreating lost data would be the most expensive and timeconsuming task after a catastrophic event...you must have off site backups, and tapes are still best for this.
Re:Tapes still better (Score:1)
Also, if the OS freaked out, and trashed part of the FS, you're most likely to lose both here, too.
mirroring only saves you from hardware failures, which do definitely happen. But the last several times I had to pull some stuff off tape, it was from human error.
It's a restore system, not a backup system (Score:1)
I use RCS on source code and configuration files so that I can restore any version ever archived. RCS lets me record a comment on each change, so years later, I can tell what I was thinking when I did something stupid.
I rsync the whole system nightly to another host. In theory, if the primary host dies, I could reboot the secondary host with the backup root partition, and be up 2 minutes later. This has not been tested recently. Mostly, I use this like any other nightly backup, but restores happen at disk/network speed, not tape speeds.
I also use rsync to copy the whole system before doing upgrades, going on vacation, or other times when I want the option to restore from a particular point in time.
I "archive" things to CDR. That is for anything I want to be able to restore more than 18 months from now.
Disk drives are getting cheaper, so I'll be buying more so that I can do more types of restores. (weekly, monthly, etc...)
Re:IDE Backups, great, but... (Score:1)
Although this requires high speed connectons a setup of your main server in EST Time Zone and a backup server located in the PST Time Zone would be perfectly feasable and safe.
Re:as long as the drives last (Score:1)
Re:Tapes still better (Score:1)
as long as the drives last (Score:1)
It would seem to me that if you are using an IDE drive for backup, you might want to store it offsite - which could mean frequent handling of the hard drive, increasing the possibility that something might go wrong with it. Just a thought. I've got 2 drives in my machine (a quantum bigfoot 4.3, and a Maxtor 15.5), and do back up important(ish) stuff onto the other drive (depending on which drive the original is on). Not especially secure, but better than nothing I guess.
Lindsay
What about one of these (Score:2)
Maxtor DiamondMax 61.4GB 5400rpm 2MB Cache Buffer 8.9ms Access Time ATA-66, 96147U8 Bulk $ 267.95 [z-buy.com]
Imagine one of these in your mp3 jukebox !
Re:Tapes still better (Score:2)
You say that the math is such that tapes are cheaper, but I challenge you to do the math. A tape drive that is capable of storing 40 BG of storage (uncompressed) will be expensive. The only technology that comes close is DLT. A 35/70GB DLT will set you back about 5 grand! Then the damn tapes are $35 a pop (and, once again, filled with a lot of things that can break)!
Depending on that data (and this is really what backups are all about, huh?), the hard disk option is making more and more sense these days.
Now, where does it not make sense? With my customer. They have a need to have immediate access to data that is up to 5 years old (telecommunincation regulations). We are talking exabytes of data. We have to use these *HUGE* StorageTek silos that are packed with DLT cartridges and drives and controlled by robotics. In this sceneraio moving this data to disk makes no sense and is not econmonical. These guys cycle through 4.5TB of storage every 10 days!!! The biggest issue with tapes these days is the scale that we are talking about before it starts to pay not using hard disks!
I was pondering a few hours ago about this exact issue. My solution will be to get about 4 more disks (for less than the price of a decent tape drive but with a *LOT* more capicity) and keep a mirror handy. Once a week, remove the mirrored disk and replace it with another, sync the mirror, and repeat. For my data, this is plenty good enough. For my customer, forget it.
Tapes still better (Score:3)
If you must do it this way, at least stick the drives in a RAID 1 array. You get all the benefits of your backup, except it is always a "perfect" or "realtime" backup instead of a nightly thing because disk writes are written to each disk simultaneously (mirrored). In addition to getting the redundancy of as many disks as you have in the array, you will see a big jump in your read performance (not write, though).
--
Perhaps, but only as a first regression.. (Score:3)
You can even off-site them easily; IDE pull racks and perhaps a small bootable image (a single floppy) will ensure they're more universally accessable than a tape..
Myself, I use a mix of IDE, tape and CD. IDE gets first gen, tape gets 2-4, and every third fifth gen backup is converted to CDRAID.
IDE Backups, great, but... (Score:3)
Which leads me to my newest venture (and if any of you out there would like to invest, let me know) a Moon-Base for data storage. Where could be better for lawlessness and security. The only thing that could take it out is an asteroid.. Well, that or if the US dusted off its plan to nuke the moon.. In closing: IDE backups are good. Moon-bases are better. -Josh