Whats the best backup solution/hardware?

[Anonymous]

We have an xserve and xraid here with about 1tb of student work on that needs backing up on a daily basis. I have been looking at solutions and the best so far looks like the Exabyte 221L LTO:
http://www.exabyte.com/products/products/get_products.cfm?prod_id=30&product=221L

and bru for the software side.

What do you think, or can you ofer any other ideas?

[kcarlile]

Well, it’s hard to beat the Exabyte prices, but I’m uncertain on their reliability (or viability as a company). I’d be looking at Overland Data, HP, or Breece Hill (not sure on the last one).

I’m cautiously optimistic on BRU, but Retrospect 6 is pretty darn proven and fairly easy to operate. If you can get BRU working, then it would be an excellent choice. I’ve had a few problems with it, which I’m not getting into (since the last time I vented, it made it back to the author of the program, and I felt pretty bad…)

[Anonymous]

We have an XServe with a 1.3 TB capacity, and are using retrospect 6, and a Sony AIT tape library. Unfortunately it’s AIT-1 (pretty slow 4MB/sec & -only- 525GB native capacity. The AIT-2 library should work IF you have lots of docs that compress pretty well, otherwise, the AIT-3 libraries are probably your best bet.

Retrospect saved me just yesterday (power outage that killed a machine).

[Anonymous]

We use Overlander Expess and Retrospect for Xserve System HD (80G and 250GB (network homes) module

[jtnt]

I just recently revamped our backup procedures. We were on regular DLT tapes and that just wasn’t cutting it. Too slow, not enough room on individual tapes. We had simply outgrown it.

For years, when I thought backup, I automatically thought (and used) tape. I looked into Exabyte (the system you listed and others) and other tape solutions, but I finally shifted my thinking and decided to go with disk-based backups using external drives (that we swap off-site etc just like tapes). (Retrospect can span a backup over any number of disks, just as with tape.) The cost for the amount of space is a fraction. You aren’t locked into a drive type. LTO, SDLT, Exabyte’s new PacketLoader thing, etc. Plus, speed! Not just for backup, but the important part, restore is not even a comparison. Disk is so much faster.

With the price of HD space going down and the capacity going up, you can definitely find a solution that fits.

Now, you may also want to keep tape around for archival backup, but you may be able to build yourself a cheaper, faster solution for daily backups with disks.

I have about 20% of what you have to back up every night, but frankly, some of the advantages for you might even be more noticeable with more data to deal with.

Not right for everyone, not claiming it is… just putting it out there that I am one person that is using a disk-based backup solution and it is working for me.

[ylon]

It doesn’t look like much work has been done in the way of testing out BackupPC by folks in these forums (I being guilty as well since it would have required a little initial setup) and thought I should bring this to the forefront.

It seems that this might be an ideal solution for us as it gives a nice interface to rsync/ssh or hfstar I believe as well. Given this, it would be very handy to have a backup server offsite (or take them offsite as your protocol may demand) and keep the backup on hard drives (due to the aforementioned benefits). It seems that even this option could be far quicker than tapes in most scenarios and, apparently, you can have a nice differential if you need to go back to changes from a specific date given in the threshold you define…

A thought that perhaps we should all more thoroughly explore.

[Author]

Posts