We backup our xSAN to a remote* Xserve RAID using a wrapper tool for rsync called ‘snapback2’… Takes hourly snapshots of on-disk changes, and forwards them to our colo.
Extra Xserve – $0 (we’re using an old 1st gen G4 to do this now that it’s no longer our file server… But to avoid cheating, call it $5000)
Extra Xserve RAID – $12000
Bandwidth devoted to backup – $3000/year for 2MBps (not that much changes hourly with us)
So, For $20K first year, plus $3K/year, we get six months of hourly backups (we don’t need to go further back than that for backup purposes… We have DVD archives of our finished projects in a juke, as well), that can, in a pinch, ALSO serve as a disaster recovery duplicate of our file server/xSAN configuration.
Note – we did the initial rsync of the server over a one week period ON SITE, then moved the backup offsite.
Anyway, That ended up being a much more flexible/affordable solution for us than any* tape options out there to hold a similar amount of data. Being able to DAV or NFS mount for recovery of individual files is a nice bonus… Of course, disks are always going to be more volatile than tape, so I’d build in another couple grand yearly for replacement disks.
I guess it all depends on how many bad tape experiences you’ve ever had, and what methodologies you use to regularly verify the integrity of backups. Disk to disk is really* easy for that, too.
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