Affordable Backup Hardware for Today's Systems?

Sloppy asks: "Hard disk capacity (and usage, thanks to multimedia) has blossemed in the last few years, and my DDS2 tape drive is no longer adequate for the job of backing up. What concerns me is that I don't see anything on the market that I can replace it with, except for autoloaders that cost thousands of dollars and will likewise fall into obsolesence very quickly. Does anyone have any suggestions for backing up dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of gigabytes?" and JQuazar asks: "There's a nice thread here on software, how about tape drive hardware? I'm looking for opinions and recommendations for a hefty (10 gigs or better) tape drives that will work well with Linux. Onstream's ADR50 has some nice press, anyone used it? I'm willing to shell out for a good drive but must hold costs under $1000. For the record I want to make frequent backups and not archives, else perhaps a strong case could be made to just use CD-R. For discussions sake, the smallest partition is 5 gigs and I don't want to swap media more than once."

Affordable storage

[billybob2001]

Send it all into space (I don't know, maybe use satellite dishes or something) and then download it from the SETI site when you want it back again.

Try Ecrix

[coliano]

A company called Ecrix produces the VXA tape drive. The cartridges have a 66Gb capacity and the transfer rate is advertised "as high as 6mbps." I don't know if or how well it runs under linux but this thing looks pretty sweet. At comdex last year I saw an ad where they backed up a system on one of these drives then immersed the cartridge in water, next they froze the whole thing. After they thawed the solid block of ice and let the tape dry thoroughly they were able to restore all the data. You can pick one up for just about a $1000.00. I'm interested in getting one of these for myself, so if anyone has used one, please comment.

Re:Hard disks?

[SEWilco]

Or a cheap array of RAID IDE drives? Reserve one row of drives for backups, with automatic poweroff set on them so they'll go to sleep while you're not using them...

Onstream DI30 and ADR50 are good

[danpbrowning]

I've used the Onstream 30GB with Linux and it's great. Cheap too, $200 and $33/tape. It's IDE, so if you haven't invested in a SCSI card there's no need to. The ADR50 is probably good too, like you said.

One of our sales guys was looking for a low end backup solution (for the sub $3000 server systems we sell) and settled on the Onstream DI30. But we typically use HP DAT24 drives which are about 1k. Hope that helps.

DVD?

[Beowulf_Boy]

What about a dvd writable? Have they come out yet?
I know they store like 7gigs, and with compression you could get atleast 10 or so, and it would be alot more stable than tape

Re:DVD?

[Sloppy]

Alas, that would be far too small. 7 gigs is insignificant compared to the size of today's hard disks. It would take 10 of them just to back up one disk. :(

(And, typically, multimedia stuff is already compressed.)

---

8mm

[Xenu]

I currently use Exabyte 8mm tape drives for most of my backup jobs. They have gotten cheaper, but they are still over $1000 for a basic 8mm tape drive. What I really like about them is the cheap media. You can get 112m 8mm tapes at very good prices. All the other tape drives, including the high-end 8mm models, charge outrageous prices for blank tapes. This can kill your budget when you need a large number of tape cartridges. I would like to have a higher density tape drive, as long as the media price was reasonable.

Re:Hard disks?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Well, now you have to backup those backup hard disks. As far as reliability, tape is ALWAYS the way to go. CD-r's and DVD rams will do it too, for ad hock stuff. Also, why backup programs? Programs you usually have the disk, or as with Linux, you have the distro disk and if for some reason it gets toasted, you can get another one for fairly cheap. I'd backup /etc, /home, /boot and maybe a few miscellaneous directories (if using Linux). Why backup /usr ? They are all programs and most if not all are already on a CD somewhere. No need. I also fail to see why people would waste too much HD space with MP3's. Burn em on CD-R's and you can cart em around, take them with you. If you have a portable or that AIWA car stereo, play them in the portable. If in an office situation, I reccomend the Tivoli storage system ( I think it used to be IBM's ADSM. It uses IBM hardware ). The thing can backup nearly anything including mainframes and PC's. Their's a client available for almost any computer. It's vary expensive tho. If you want to rotate tape off site (YOU SHOULD), make extra sure you do not under estimate the amount of tape you need.

Re:Try Ecrix

[Ryan Kirkpatrick]

As one who has a VXA drive at home and work, I highly recommend them! They work great with Linux, no problems encountered was so ever. As for transfer speed, I typically see 1 MB/sec to 2.5 MB/sec transfer rates from Ultra (Wide) disks to a narrow drive (VXA drives are available as LVD wide and SE narrow). One oddness of the drive is that write speed is actually faster than read speed, usually about 0.5 to 0.75 MB/sec. Nothing major, but just interesting.

As for price, they do come in about $1k, but they have been having a promo deal going for the last couple of months (always extended by one more month lately!). With the deal, you can get the drive at almost 50% off (one drive only of course). Sign up for their email newsletter for more details on the promo deal. Though, tapes are moderately expensive, three sizes, ranging from $30 to $80 each, last I checked.

Overall, they are very good drives and I would recommend them as the next step up after Onstream and Travan style drives, and one step below DLT style drives. They provide many of the benefits of the Exabyte Mammoth drives, but at a much lower cost.
-------------------------------

And the 2nd backup set goes where?

[hatless]

Not bad, if you don't mind keeping just a single backup and don't feel like keeping the last set offsite in case of fire/theft/etc.

Fortress Technologies "SPS protocol"

[1000baseFX]

Has anyone else used/looked at their products? They run an extremely trimmed (20MB +/-) Debian 2.1 on a SanDisk FlasDrive. Their kicker is the SPS protocol, is there anything else like it?

Re:Hard disks?

[Sloppy]

I started looking around at tape drives but, as you've apparently also found, they were really expensive and didn't offer much capacity when compared to the hard drives I needed to back up.

Tape has always been based on the assumption that tape media is far cheaper per megabyte (perhaps an order of magnitude) than disks. But HD manufacturers are now seriously challenging that assumtion. I remember how amazed I was that a $10 DDS2 tape could hold 4 Gig. $2.5 per gig, not bad. DDS4 is down to around $2.0 per gig. But now IDE hard disks are within a factor of two of that, down to around $4 per gig! In a year or two, they'll catch up unless there's a tape revolution. If only cheap disks were removeable...

---

Neat box from HP

[jon_adair]

It's not what you're looking for, but maybe other readers could use this.

I saw an ad for one of these and they sound neat. HP has a box [hp.com] that sounds perfect for small offices and workgroups. It's kind of like a backup appliance. The desktops and laptops install client software and backup to this server. No magic there. But when it's time to recover a machine, the box can burn a bootable CD that will restore the machine to the last backup. Pretty nifty.

Re:Try Ecrix

[Sloppy]

This might be the one. Thank you!
---

Hard disks?

[ArcticChicken]

Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?

A couple of years ago I realized I really needed a decent backup solution. I started looking around at tape drives but, as you've apparently also found, they were really expensive and didn't offer much capacity when compared to the hard drives I needed to back up. That's when I realized that just setting aside a couple 20 Gb HDD's for backups made way more sense than blindly following the "traditional" tape-backup route. Why follow the herd? Get yourself a RAID setup with a stack of IDE drives. Backup your important data onto the server overnight (or whenever).

If you want something a bit more glamorous, take a look at the StorPoint NAS 100 [axis.com] from AXIS [axis.com]. It's about $1000 retail - I don't believe any SCSI disks are included (I know, more than you wanted to spend). But the beauty of this thing is, much like the AXIS video camera [slashdot.org] many here on /. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.

Fight the power! Forget the tapes! ;)

Re:Try Ecrix

[Llama Keeper]

One of my customers (A video Production company) just recently purchased one of these drives. They run it both on their Linux File Server.... (Think Huge Video RAID storage) and on both of thier WINNT Maya 3D Machines. The drive is almost as fast as advertised and definitly works well. Media cost however is an issue, especially as cheap as these people are

THis is my suggestion for bang for buck in tape solutions. We were useing an Onstream Tape drive...a and my biggest complaint w/ that was speed. Too Damn Slow!

Removable hard drives!

[GooseKirk]

I recently bought a pair of 60gig Maxtor IDEs and the Promise FastSwap kit to use as backup for my office. One drive is mounted in a PC and making network backups every hour, with multiple versions of important files, and then every couple days I bring in the removable hard drive from offsite, pop it in and blam, practically instantaneous backup. Best of all I don't have to worry that a few years down the line, if the office burns down, that I won't be able to find some goofy proprietary tape backup system to work with my backup tape... instead I can always pull the hard drive out of its case and throw it into any old PC that's sitting around and I have instant access to all my Precious Stuff.

You can pick up the drives for just over two bills each, and the FastSwap for about $150, so for roughly half the price of a good tape system (apparently) you'll have a much better setup (imho). Plus you won't have to listen to that damn tape drive...

Re:Try Ecrix

[djweis]

I've used one quite a bit, they seem to have problems. One had to be sent back as out of box defective, the media is way overpriced, and the drive had problems on both an adaptec 2940 card and an IBM ServeRaid card under Linux.

On the other hand, I also use HP DDS3 drives, you can get about 24 gigs compressed per drive. They aren't screamers, but they work correctly.

Re:Removable hard drives!

[AtrN]

This is what we're going to do to back up 300GB of FreeBSD server. Disk is very cheap and fast these days. The reliability is pretty good too.

Re:Hard disks?

[sonny]

That will help against harddisk crashes. But what if don't need the data anymore for the moment, but maybe again next year. Or what if a user made a mistake and modified some data in a not so fortunate way and you need the files, like the where a week ago?

Under these circumstances tape-backups a quite handy.

Re:Hard disks?

[SEWilco]

I didn't say the RAID array was a copy of your file systems. It's a backup device. You should have several backups for just the reason you give. This disk backup device may have a directory for each day. Or maybe you're checking all your files into CVS...

Re:Hard disks?

[3107813]

Why burn mp3s when large cheap hard drives are only at most 3 times more expensive than blank cdrs. Who wants to shuffle around scratched cds all the time? RJ