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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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
Daniel
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
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.
Gorkman
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.
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?
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...
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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 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.
Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?
/. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.
;)
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 from AXIS. 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 many here on
Fight the power! Forget the tapes!
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...