[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[Adam Bultman]

Richard Mancusi wrote:

>This is a very site specific question.  How often are you required to restore?
>How quickly are you expected to complete your restore?  How far back is it
>expected that you have retained data onsite and off?
>
>Offsite storage is very important as an archive - but fairly useless for
>quick recovery unless it is near.
>
>I am forced to rotate 15 EOD backups AND I rotate a special weekend
>backup offsite for each of my servers.  Call it a bad environment if you wish.
>I call it go with the flow.
>
>  
>

Interesting thing to note here, is what I'm told is a new 'paradigm' in 
backing up (something I might actually try sometime in the near 
future):  Evidently some people have been buying a couple large hard 
drives, backing up to those, and then using the tape to back up that - 
it both allows for quicker backups on the servers (instead of writing to 
slow tape, you zip it off to the large, IDE drives, probably in a fast 
server with a gigabit connectino to the switch) and then transfering it 
to tape. You keep a few days worth of backups on the IDE drives, and you 
rotate things on and off.  If you need a file restored, you can take if 
off the drives if it is in rotation, or pull it from tape.  You still 
use hard drives, but mostly for temporary backup storage, not as the 
final solution.

It sounds like a good idea to me - spare server, 300 bucks for a couple 
160-200 GB drives, and it'll save a lot of time backing up...

Adam

>Rich
>
>
>On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:52:35 -0600, David L. Willson
><dlwillson at thegeek.nu> wrote:
>  
>
>>OK, I'm no newbie, and I find myself asking the same damn question every
>>time I get into the Backup & Disaster Recovery design process.  Why does any
>>business with less than a TB of data to backup use tapes?  Why, why, why,
>>when almost any fixed disk media is much cheaper and almost as easy to take
>>offsite?
>>
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