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Affordable Backup Hardware for Today's Systems?

Posted by Cliff on from the when-4G-tapes-just-aren't-enough dept.

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."

9 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Affordable storage by billybob2001 · · Score: 4

    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.

  2. Try Ecrix by coliano · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Try Ecrix by Ryan+Kirkpatrick · · Score: 3
      As one who has a VXA drive at home and work, I highly recommend them! They work great with Linux, no problems encountered was so ever. As for transfer speed, I typically see 1 MB/sec to 2.5 MB/sec transfer rates from Ultra (Wide) disks to a narrow drive (VXA drives are available as LVD wide and SE narrow). One oddness of the drive is that write speed is actually faster than read speed, usually about 0.5 to 0.75 MB/sec. Nothing major, but just interesting.

      As for price, they do come in about $1k, but they have been having a promo deal going for the last couple of months (always extended by one more month lately!). With the deal, you can get the drive at almost 50% off (one drive only of course). Sign up for their email newsletter for more details on the promo deal. Though, tapes are moderately expensive, three sizes, ranging from $30 to $80 each, last I checked.

      Overall, they are very good drives and I would recommend them as the next step up after Onstream and Travan style drives, and one step below DLT style drives. They provide many of the benefits of the Exabyte Mammoth drives, but at a much lower cost.
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      "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
  3. Re:Hard disks? by SEWilco · · Score: 2

    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...

  4. 8mm by Xenu · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. And the 2nd backup set goes where? by hatless · · Score: 2

    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.

  6. Hard disks? by ArcticChicken · · Score: 2

    Have you considered adding a stack of SCSI drives onto a server somewhere and using the HDD's as your backup device?

    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 /. have oohed and awwed about, you can just drop it onto your network - no dedicated file server required.

    Fight the power! Forget the tapes! ;)

    1. Re:Hard disks? by SEWilco · · Score: 2

      I didn't say the RAID array was a copy of your file systems. It's a backup device. You should have several backups for just the reason you give. This disk backup device may have a directory for each day. Or maybe you're checking all your files into CVS...

  7. Removable hard drives! by GooseKirk · · Score: 2

    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...