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Hardware

Backups-Cheap IDE Drives as Alternative to Tapes? 17

Posted by Cliff from the to-be-or-not-to-be-cost-effective dept.
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?
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Backups-Cheap IDE Drives as Alternative to Tapes? More

Backups-Cheap IDE Drives as Alternative to Tapes?

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  • Well (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I use IDE drives to store my pr0n. I have 5 60 gig IDE drives arranged in what is commonly referred to as a pr0n level 5 cluster. Basically, my pr0n is readable at up to 5x normal IDE speeds. The redundancy (also referred to as puss-e) of the array also protects my pr0n from drive failure.

    Timothy
    timothy@monkey.org

  • 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

  • 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.

  • well, i've never had much luck with Quantums, they last for a while, but for backup purposes, i'd want a better brand. just my personal opinion...

    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • Actually, IDE's are a good idea and there are now kits that fit 5 1/4 bays that allow you use a 3 1/2 IDE drive as a portable device. Very slick, they even have cylinder-key locking mechanisms. Look around for one of these if you need to store the data off-site. Also, after backing up your data, you should remove the drive from the system. This will protect the data in the event that the system is damaged, such an electrical spike or outage.
  • I do this at home...using raid between a couple of bigass disks...if there's a fire, i'll miss my data, but I think I'll have bigger worries.

    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.
  • One bad thing about a RAID 1 array is that a lot of times what you're restoring for people is something they accidentally rm'd themselves. Or "mysteriously" disappeared ("I didn't do anything, I swear!"...yeah, right).

    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.
  • The backup is just one step in making your restores work.

    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...)

  • I too am looking at this route for effective, fast, and cheap backup. The advantage to tape is its easy portability but when you think about it this can be achieved easilly with IDE Drives located on another dedicated backup server "offsite". To be really safe you could create a RAID Array on the backup to counter the inevitable hardware failure. What is offsite anyway; is it another room, building, city, etc.

    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.
  • Are tapes really any more reliable?!? Hard drives get written to and read from at a ratio of a billion to one over a magnetic tape and which one fails more frequently? I throw away bad tapes regularly and can only remember maybe once or twice when a hard disk has completely failed.
  • Tapes decay... tapes are bad... dollar per meg, I've found that Castlewood ORB drives [castlewood.com] are the best. 2.2 gigs to the disk... very nice...
  • A 13GB Quantum Fireball KA drive I purchased last October recently stopped working on me - all data lost - extremely inconvenient.

    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

  • 60 gigs, cheap as chips and would do the job

    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 !
  • What about the moving parts inside of tapes? I have had countless issues with tapes. The travan cartridges are expensive becase there is a fair amount of mechanics in them! DDS cartridges are cheaper and more portable, but the drives are expensive and (here's the real kicker) TAPE STORAGE TECHNOLOGY ISN'T KEEPING UP WITH HARD DISK TECHNOLOGY!!! These DDS drives are just not big enough anymore.

    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)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Friday June 09, 2000 @07:22PM (#1012468) Homepage
    You speak of "cheapness" as if cost was the deciding factor, but do the math and you will find that tapes are way - way - cheaper per megabyte than hard drives. Not to mention issues of portability and reliability. I don't know, but something about my backups being full of moving parts seems onerous to me.

    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).

    --
  • If yopu only require one or two restorable regressions, or resorations are frequent, a couple of relativly cheap IDE drives might fit the bill. Of course, at some point of backlog/downtime cost, you'd be better off sticking with tapes.

    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)

    by FoxIVX ( 104861 ) on Friday June 09, 2000 @02:46PM (#1012470)
    I use IDE Backups now, for many of the reaons you know and listed, but the one drawback I can think of is that you cant take them off site. If you have serious data you NEED to protect, and a (fire, flood, dwarf invasion, et.al.) strikes your facility, it could take out both machines and the drives in them... With tapes and the like you can at least take one home with you each week for what we, in the biz, like to call "off-site data storage". Then again, you just just arrainge with the new off-shore data haven to host one of those IDE drives..

    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

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