Post #188,581
12/30/04 2:45:08 PM
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'Tape - I hate tape - there's nothing worse than tape -
- except not having tape" - Trudy Holt (an 30 year mainframer with heavy PC experience who's been a sometimes business associate).
A backup scheme that doesn't rotate back-ups off site is, in my opinion, highly questionable. Off-site rotation is the only defence against fire, flood, theft, acts of war and civil disobedience and acts of vengeful employees. For most modest size businesses that means tape. More than once the day has been saved by the tape in the owners wife's purse.
80-Gig DLT drives are reasonably affordable these days and several of my clients have them. Others are fine with 8-Gig or 20-Gig DAT (the main advantage of which is cheap tapes).
I always do tell the clients that tape drives are fragile and failure prone, so figure replacing it every 2 to 3 years - and to balance that against the cost of total data loss (in many cases that cost would be loss of the business).
For those really financially strained I buy a reconditioned DAT drive, or a couple from eBay to make sure I get a good one. With DAT I can convince them to buy enough tapes for proper rotation.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #188,585
12/30/04 3:28:02 PM
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with Andrew but a step further
have the tape backup on a separate linux box from the rest of the equipment. Have everyone do hot backups to Linux and have the linux box back to tape for offsite storage, rotating tapes from home to work is just fime in a small outfit. Whatever you do test the integrity of the backups monthly. A cacked head that doesnt backup correctly and doesnt throw errors could be a problem if you needed a complete restore down the road.
regards,
daemon
that way too many Iraqis conceived of free society as little more than a mosh pit with grenades. ANDISHEH NOURAEE
clearwater highschool marching band [link|http://www.chstornadoband.org/|http://www.chstornadoband.org/]
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Post #188,589
12/30/04 3:59:23 PM
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For the cost of the...
The New SDLT drives or even the new AIT drives, you can get a system together that'll do nearly everything you need.
SDLT (bare-drives) are costing $4700 brand-new, $6500 with retail kit.
For that money, you could buy a setup with SCSI drives or like I did with the SATA and PATA drives. The hotswap features needed are nearly perfectly aligned with SATA and SATA-II. Reducing the costs of these cages.
Promise make a 12 drive SATA-II capable rackmount. It works with 2 of their cards or 1 of 3ware's. It is cheaper than you think, would work just fine from a 2-4U rackmount system. You could put a single Hot-swap slot cage for the backup media in the actual machine.
Soon, real soon, I foresee Storage cabinets with mountains of SATA drives and a robot to insert and manage the drives in 4-16 swap slots.
This will be the backup of the future, the tape drives will no longer be needed, Drive technology will just keep getting bigger and cheaper and faster.
Watchout for iSCSI and storage arrays 150 Kilometers away from the machine(s) using them, with additional mirrors even farther away.
-- [link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg], [link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwetheyNo matter how much Microsoft supporters whine about how Linux and other operating systems have just as many bugs as their operating systems do, the bottom line is that the serious, gut-wrenching problems happen on Windows, not on Linux, not on Mac OS. -- [link|http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1622086,00.asp|source]Here is an example: [link|http://www.greymagic.com/security/advisories/gm001-ie/|Executing arbitrary commands without Active Scripting or ActiveX when using Windows]
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Post #188,594
12/30/04 4:43:41 PM
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SDLT vs AIT...
...an angle you may not have thought of.
Tape Safe Space.
SLDTs are BIG. Physically, I mean; A single SDLT tape occupies the same space as 4 AIT3 tapes.
Tape safe space is not cheap, and gets progressively more not cheap once you go past the 2.5 hour mark and as the rated temperature rises.
One might say that one is willing to take a chance on a crappy tape safe; it's worth bearing in mind that 50% of all companies that suffer a total data loss go out of business within 12 months.
Peter
[link|http://www.ubuntulinux.org|Ubuntu Linux]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
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Post #188,631
12/30/04 9:38:38 PM
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SATA? No way.
First, those systems are a bit rich for my clients. Most ar fine with an 80-Gig DLT (or even a 40-Gig or 20-Gig DAT). The 80-Gig drive runs under $1300 and another $420 for 7 tapes (daily rotation plus monthly alternate).
Trouble with SATA drives is they (especially in a hot swap tray) don't fit comfortably in a purse. SATAs are also very fragile. I've seen photographers get entire jobs wiped out (and recovery houses couldn't recover anything for thousands of dollars) when someone dropped a 1" drive in the parking lot. 3" drives are infinitely more fragile than that.
And here's something NOBODY is talking about. I pull a lot of drives out of machines and store them for repair use. A year later about 30% of those drives are DEAD - and I don't mean the platters are stuck to the heads, I mean they are DEAD.
I absolutely won't trust hard disks with archival storage no matter how cheap they are. Tapes last a long time, even at above a comfortable room temperature. Hard disks don't survive the best storage conditions.
People have been writing articles titled "Tape is Dead" for about 2 decades now, and tape still isn't dead.
[link|http://www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #188,632
12/30/04 9:46:02 PM
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What You Said.
Peter
[link|http://www.ubuntulinux.org|Ubuntu Linux]
[link|http://www.kuro5hin.org|There is no K5 Cabal]
[link|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org|Home]
Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
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Post #189,282
1/7/05 7:06:15 AM
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Re: SATA? No way. Huh?
Curious: are there a few surface-mount Tantalum caps on those boards?
Ta.s typ. fail as dead short (fractional-ohm). Some I know have seen one burn through the epoxy board, like a knife.. So unless it's a clever PS \ufffd l\ufffd Tek, where any overload simply produces repetitive start-up pulses of limited current - DEAD would be the word.
Seems an odd development. Obv you see many more samples than moi - but I wonder if this is an effect of some recent cheesy million-part component purchases. I've occasionally started up a few 1-to-a-few GB drives, now nearly 10? years old, with no problem. Not even ATA, of course - just IDE.
WTF - we may not need 'permanent storage' in any traditional sense - the next Gen users of stone knives won't even be able to spell 'analog'.
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Post #189,288
1/7/05 9:03:31 AM
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Isn't that what happens when
Ana goes numba2 == analog
What are these Stones Kanives you talk about?
Me use this not-pointy rock to bash things. Me spill red icky wet stuff all over if Me use pointy rock. Nice rock keep meat sack from spilling, me then have to bash real good to get lumps out of meat sack. One thing, Me no like fluffy stuff on meat sack. Me wamt to no chew that.
/me surpresses primordial self again, back to you regularly scheduled program
-- [link|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net|greg], [link|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ iwethey[link|http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=134485&cid=11233230|"Microsoft Security" is an even better oxymoron than "Miltary Intelligence"] No matter how much Microsoft supporters whine about how Linux and other operating systems have just as many bugs as their operating systems do, the bottom line is that the serious, gut-wrenching problems happen on Windows, not on Linux, not on Mac OS. -- [link|http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1622086,00.asp|source]
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Post #189,436
1/8/05 10:44:28 PM
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Umgawa, meatus
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