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Is Storage Capacity Outstriping Backup Capability?

Posted by Cliff on from the terabyte-backup-solutions-anyone dept.

Kzip asks: "On my modest home LAN we have four computers with around 300Gb of storage. A lot of this is used, but not a lot of it is backed up (certainly not on a regular basis). When I started looking for a backup solution I found that most of the affordable tape backup was way to small (DAT 12/24 is just too small now a days) or too slow (Onstream do 50Gb but on IDE it's only ~1MB/s ... so 6 tapes over 80+ hours!) or just too expensive (HP Ultrium is great, but at £3000 for a drive and £120 per tape it's a little pricey). So I'd like to ask the /. community: Does anyone know of a fast and affordable backup system for home/small office use." After a quick scan of Pricewatch and other sites, it seems that backup solutions >99G are expensive (all the ones I could find were more than $1000US). How long will it be before these and terabyte-backup solutions become affordable for SOHO ? use?

3 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. big backup costs big $$$ by green+pizza · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At my university, our college of engineering bought a StorageTek Powderhorn for interdepartmental backup. The model we have currently has 100 TB of storage capacity and can be expanded to 300 TB. Its host is a massive Sun server connected to the core network switch via two gigE links and and one ATM link. At the server level in various departments and groups we are mostly doing RAID as disks have become so darn cheap. A simple script dumps data onto the Powderhorn across the street once a week in the event of a major malfunction (RAID recoveries don't always go smoothly), theft, or fire.

  2. RAID maybe - but dont backup HD to HD... by Bazman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So you think you're pretty smart by buying two big HDs and doing a nightly copy of one to the other? Just think what happens when the source disk fails in the middle of the nightly backup. You have a failed source disk. And a half-baked backup disk. With a possibly unrecoverable file system. You just lost all your data.

    I think if you want to do backups to HD you need three of them!

  3. traditional backups to the cheapest reliable media by hamjudo · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You still want some schedule of full, and partial backups with some combination of on and offsite storage. You also want to use affordable media.

    All the Unix backup tools can backup to disk as easily as to tape. Carriers to make ATA/100 disks removable cost about $10 each. ATA/100 disks are cheap per megabyte.

    There are techniques to make the disks hot swappable, or use a dedicated backup machine that can be easily powered down to swap disks.

    Most importantly! It's a restore system, not a backup system.

    Nobody cares how great your backups are, if you can't do a restore when you need it.