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Backup Tapes: Alive And Kicking
yootje writes "The Register runs an article about the future of backup tapes, which looks pretty good. Although some people say backup tapes are dead, tape systems continue to evolve. To prove that, The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come, like the SL8500."
I should stop using the tape jukebox system I have on my NetBSD box?
We're still using tape back up, and will continue to do so. It works.
We still use tapes for backup, and have no intention on killing them anytime soon. It's a good system that is proven to work. Companies need more than a well-dressed salesperson to convince us otherwise.
I just inherited aN HP 3000 running MPe/iX, nasty. Went to retrieve some files from tape, both tape drives were shot. Ate the tapes, with years of work. The last other full backup was 9/03... Ouch. Our vendor is coming to fix the drives, but I'm looking elsewhere long term. (Especially killing the HP 3k!)
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
The pundits of backup-to-disk always neglect to mention the fact that though disk costs continue to decrease and storage capacity continues to increase, so do the capacities of tape storage mechanisms. Even at $50 US a tape, they would still have a lower cost-per-gigabyte (or is it now cost-per-terabyte?). Especially with organizations with SANs, backup-to-disk is TOO expensive and too wasteful for prescious SAN resources.
And now the medium is still being used well into 2004 and shows no signs of fading away. That's over 20 years the medium has been around for, relatively unchanged. Geez.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
Until optical media surpasses them in storage capacity, ease of use, and reliability, I don't see tape technology going anywhere. They serve a specific purpose and serve it well.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
We have an ADIC Scalar 1000 with 12 tape drives and something like 200 terabytes of storage space. I doubt tapes are going to die any time soon.
The article wasn't much more than a press release, but it was nice to see that tape is the obvious answer if you have *petabytes* of data to backup.
Since prior stories have illuminated optical (laser) retention problems, tape does not seem as outdated as it once was. Tape's biggest problem now seems mainly cost. I had a 5GB Travan in a system and the per-tape cost was around $40. DVD blanks are around $1 for about the same amount of storage.
I do bi-weekly tape backups. Hard drives aren't reliable/durable enough, and their shelf life isn't good enough for backups. Optical media have the same problems, but worse. I can't imagine tape going away for a good long time.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
We are on the verge of getting some new silos in that will contain the new 500gig tapes. Right now our current setup has about 4-5 petabytes worth of storage for just tapes Thats Each storagetek silo holding about 7000 tapes. And lets just say the silos never have a break. Garrett
A couple of weeks ago I went to a careers conference at which the product manager for HP tape drives (based in HP, Bristol, UK) waxed lyrical about tape drives...it appears that HP are still actively researching tape drives, and have devoted significant resources towards future development.
Whoever submitted this story sounds like s/he is really rooting for backup tapes... perhaps even has tape vs. optical storage showdowns at home while watching "Myth Busters" on Discovery.
You're living in the past.
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
With tape drives you have to cope with tape standards changing every year. Want to read tapes that are more than 5 years old? Not a chance. Want to back up anything above 40 GB? You have to buy incredibly expensive DLT instead of DAT, most likely with a robotic tape change mechanism. Costs you about $40000.
If anything, that's a mug's game.
We use 4TB of SCSI Disks, and removable 250GB firewire drives for backup. Tape has let me down way to many times. Plus, I can restore from a catalog with in seconds. I would love to see tape do that.
I don't think tapes are dead. We have 10 tapes for every server in our company (5 for M-F, 5 for each Saturday of the month). At around 400+ servers, that racks up in numbers pretty quick. Plus, we have to cross ship the tapes to offsite storage every day.
Also, 270 some of our servers are on WAN links, between 56k and 256k circuits. Not exactly speedy when you think of backing up over the network. Also, the bulk of our data is done in our data centers - two of them. We have to have the data offsite. I don't want to try and transfer who knows how many terabytes of data over three T1's every night. We actually have higher data throughput using a courier!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.
Some of those backup drives can hold up to 90PB of data.. holy crap.. think of what you could do with 90,000,000 GB of space... it hurts to even think about it..
The only thing that hurts worse is trying to find a space to put an 8ft x 30ft x 200ft storage device that weighs 310k pounds (140.9 metric tons(2200lbs))
[Salesperson] Sssoooooooooo....how much software do ya wanna buy? [/Salesperson]
that I wouldn't be able find a use for this box of 8 Tracks
We still use some 8mm tapes to back up some RS/6000 systems. We use 4mm tapes for the Sun and HP servers.
I would like to migrate everything to one format, but red tape has thus far prevented me from doing anything about it. I have a proposal for converting to sDLT, but corporate policy forbids anyone except the purchasing department from speaking to vendors about pricing, and purchasing won't speak to vendors at all unless they have an authorized capital expense form. I can't build the business case to get a capital expense form until I get pricing information from the vendors. It's a bitter cycle
So, I sincerely hope my 4mm and 8mm jukeboxes stay alive and functional for the forseeable future, since I can't get approval to evergreen those systems with something cheaper and better!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
We use TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) to backup our systems.
t orage-mgr/
We backup from the systems via gigabit Ethernet, to the TSM server, where the data is stored in a disk pool.
That disk pool gets flushed out to an IBM 3584 tape library. LTO2 tape drives. Great stuff.
TSM then duplicates those LTO2 tapes, and ejects
the copies from the library, for offsite storage.
Tape's going to be here for a LONG, LONG time.
Requisite links:
TSM - http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/s
IBM 3584 -
http://www.storage.ibm.com/tape/lto/index.html
The title of this article seems to imply that the author is somehow surprised by the contined use of tape.
There is NO SUBSTITUTE for tape for many backup scenarios. Are you going to backup large multi-gig file servers onto hundreds of CDs or a USB key? Are you going to take that RAID array off site every night?
The cost of moving large amounts of data "off site" (like 3 TB or so) and the business requirements to keep stuff for many years to meet legal regulations and such make this a neccessity right now. Hopefully, (not holding my breath) archive storage media with long term stability will come out in the density we need at the cost we can afford will arrive soon. Otherwise Tape is going to be around for a long time.
I've been thinking about doing backups to tape. I've yet to find something affordable for the home user with above-average storage needs. (I have around 800GB hard drive space that I would like to transfer to tape occasionally). Lower-capacity models seem too slow or too small (I don't want to use 20 tapes for each backup), while anything better costs a lot more. Sure, you are in the terrabyte regions then, but I don't need that much. Any suggestions?
...then all we need is a revival of the big station wagons!
one better than mcleodeight
I don't ever recall anyone I work with speculating on the future of nearline storage. Anyone who works in a real environment will tell you tape is not only alive and well, but a critical component of datacenter infrastructure.
They'd also probably laugh you out of the room if you proposed backing stuff up to anything but tape...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come,[...]
The problem with all of these endless new tape technologies is that after they come they (or their vendors) tend to become lethargic and lose interest in the whole process so that six months later they're trying to sell you yet another replacement technology.
That's fine for something like a computer that can run the same software each generation, but for tape devices the need to change media is like having to re-code your application in a new language every time you upgrade the computer. People don't want to do it.
Most customers want a backup media that will still be viable in at least seven years because of legal requirements. That can mean needing to be able to buy a drive that can read their tapes 5-12 years from now. How many of these new tape technologies will have that kind of staying power?
The standard 9-track 2400 foot open reel tape served the computer industry for about 30 years, providing a standard storage and interchange mechanism for pretty much every computer larger than a PC. The Internet has rendered the need for an interchange mechanism less critical, but the instability in the archival storage formats is now giving people serious headaches.
G.
who said tapes were dying? I'm happy to at last be migrating into a tape system, myself.
.. who would have that much data to backup? I can think of lots of businesses with large amounts of data .. but 90,000,000,000,000,000 is a huge number. Anyone I can think of who would have data that size would probably over write much of it quickly. Like google is always updating their databases, fFor example. And i believe the government prefers dead-trees.
btw, that SL8500 has what appears to be a max capacity of 90 Petabytes (!!!) so i'm wondering
Anyway, it's a beautiful system.
Normal Harddrives fail pitifully on this point. The drive electronics, read write heads, etc is so tied in with the physical disks that it makes it difficult to remove the disks and pop them into a working device with the ease of tapes, CDs etc.
Tapes, CDs, floppies are very clean and hassle free from this standpoint. The cartridge/media is of a standard size and can usually be popped into any "player" for playback.
Further, hard disk manufacturers also haven't been able to reach an agreement on the size, error correction and other protocols to write to disk, (like an ISO, but not quite), which is one of the reasons for difficult/expensive error recovery on hard disks. Ofcourse, tapes are also more rugged than harddrives, but I think once these other issues are sorted out, HDDs could replace tapes as a "reliable" backup device.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I work for a rather large company with around 350 HP Proliant servers. They contain a vast variety of important data from customer information to finance. We still use 8mm tapes to keep all of this information secure and on file. We have a massive library of them (Around 250,000) going back 10 years. This is the only issue that I have a problem with, space. CD recordable media is infinitely more compact. Another option we are looking into is setting up a server with 13 250 gig hardrives and specifying it as a DMZ on the network. However, for now, tapes are our primary means of back-up.
I have always found optical backup to be far more reliable than tape.
Sincerely,
Erik Lehnsherr
dinner: it's what's for beer
Hell no.
Tapes still have the most bang-for-the-buck value.
do() || do_not();
90 petabytes.. that is a lot of porn storage. *dreaming*
True, but I've had tapes go bad on me and become unreadable too. Others have posted about having tape drives eat tapes and destroy them. Any real numbers out there on the reliability of tapes on the shelf versus drives on the shelf?
I have been casually looking into using an offsite backup service (like Iron Mountain). Does anyone have any real experience?
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
.. Since I am configuring a new $12,000 Autoloader library, at this time
Only need to backup 160GB (do not forsee that growing in 5 years). Gonna just buy two 160GB IDE HDD's & 2 firewire enclosures.
~$340 for both. Keep one plugged in for daily backup, keep the other in a safe place... swap them every month.
Pretty cheap, plenty fast, and won't take up much space!
Yeah, I've been around long enough to have backed-up data on drums, TK50's, QIC DC 600A and DAT ... the burninating question though is: what about the hardware?
... let's not forget, we're talking about hardware with movable parts, which means they break. Backups are afterall made to be restored. Otherwise they're only good to string in the yard to keep the birds away from the grape vines and grass seed.
Yeah, I've got all my data stored from 20 years ago on big old 1/2" Open Reel Nine Track Tape, so what? Without working hardware that can be read and scaled on a system I currently have, then I'll need to convert it.
Note the emphasis on "working hardware"
So perhaps along with your off-site storage of your backup tapes (you do have off-site storage don't you?) you may want to stow a hot-swap.
--- have you healed your church website?
I'll need three just to back up my porn collection.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
You ever try to SELL that old C64 tape drive!?
I couldn't give mine away! (though it served me well for several years)
I sell servers to small SOHO type businesses, doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. There is never large amounts of data but it does exceed the CD-ROM limits and DVD are just to unreliable. It is too easy to burn a coaster and they have poor shelf life. And even at 9gb they are often too small to put all the data on one disk.
And getting the office receptionist(often the person who will do the job of managing the media) to swap disks is often asking too much. It has to fit on one tape/disk/whatever or it isn't going to get done.
Tape especially DAT drives give most bang for the buck.
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Our PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System)uses a Qualstar 180 tape jukebox with AIT3 tapes(100gb/tape). In a year we will be upgrading the carousels to hold 360 tapes, and upgrading the drives to AIT4(200gb/tape). We will have around 54tb storage when full due to half AIT3/AIT4 mix when full. This system is storing large medical images. (like 2000x2000x12bit).
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I always wondered why they don't use off the shelf VHS tapes for data backup. You could probably build an inexpensive, yet reasonably reliable backup unit from the mechanism+record/playback heads of a low end VCR.
My rights don't need management.
I have yet to see these new fangled, so-called 'floppy disks' prove themselves in any sort of meaningful way. I have been using my TRS-80 with it's casset tape storage since 1980, and I have no intention of switching horses in mid-stream!
Harumph!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
That's a lot of money for a home user... Sure, tape backups are what you use in a corporate setting, but for home use, my dvd burner is about as good as it can get (unfortunately).
Got any idea where I can get a sub 300$ tape backup system?
Actually, let me add that we do use a DVD Jukebox for long term archive purposes (SEC requires us to keep e-mails for 7 years) But our nightly and weekly backups are on tape.
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
Hahaha. Yeah. Price out a quality RAID 5 array (i.e. not some little piece of shit you bolted together out of IDE drives and Promise cards.) Something from a major manufacturer, such as an IBM FastT200, will cost you about $50k if you kit it out with 143GB or even 72GB drives.
With tape drives you have to cope with tape standards changing every year.
Where I work, we surplus equipment after 5 years. Our current StorageTek tape silo will be gone before we'd start caring about changing standards. The (12) 9940A and (2) 9940B drives in it are good for 100-200 GB uncompressed. We back up the entire datacenter -- UNIX, VMS, and Windows clients -- and, as long as we keep the scratch pool full, we never run into capacity issues. There is nothing to "cope with", it all Just Works.
Want to read tapes that are more than 5 years old? Not a chance.
Ever hear of backward compatibility? A DLT7000 drive can read any DLT tape you put into it. Same with DDS4, etc. As long as the tapes are stored somewhere safe and climate-controlled (such as, Idono, a datacenter?) you shouldn't ever have a problem reading them. Hell, we still use 5-year-old tape on a daily basis in our smaller IBM silo.
Want to back up anything above 40 GB? You have to buy incredibly expensive DLT instead of DAT, most likely with a robotic tape change mechanism.
Yeah, so?
Costs you about $40000.
You've obviously never priced these things. You need to add a zero. Clearly, data retention and retrieval is not important where you work.
Nice troll, though.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
These new robotic tape libraries are nifty, and 58TB nearline storage sounds great. But how much do they cost? Per GB? Because some DVD-R jukeboxes, with minimal human intervention, are pretty cheap. Which is cheaper, with lower entry cost?
--
make install -not war
bestiality.
OK, Mr. Wizard, how do I convert one of those LS-120 drives to read the digital files on my MiniDisc?
--
make install -not war
And when the tape medium becomes unreliable, we can drive up and down the highway with the tapes behind us to see how much road can be covered with the tape. You can't quite do that with AOL cd's.
I can back this up. I know this to be true.
I noticed the price isn't displayed on their site, you have to call to get a price. My guess is the price includes a plot of land, a new building with a good foundation, and a power substation.
A northern climate would be best it seems, as it dissapates 1.4M BTU of heat per hour.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Remember Jesus saves and makes nightly backups.
Technology Consulting & Free Downloads
The tape market and hard drive markets have diverged dramatically since the introduction of the hard drive into personal computers in (what 1985?), for a variety of reasons:
(1) There are far more hard drives produced each year than there are tape drives and so there's much more of an incentive to increase the capacity of hard drives.
Back in the day, 86-88ish, I was a part-time computer operator at Carnegie Mellon. We ran nightly incremental and weekly full backups onto 1/2 inch (I think it was 1/2 inch) reel-to-reel tape. It worked reasonably well because you could store a lot more on the tapes than you could on the disks that we had at the time.
(2) the backup tape market is not as tolerant of changes in technology as the disk-drive market is. Because most new disk drives are put into new computers, we don't really care much if you can't stick your 3-year-old 8 GB hard drive in it. But, it's hard to justify a new backup system that doesn't work with your 3-year-old backup tapes.
This is also magnified by the price differential: disk drives benefit from much larger economies of scale than are tape drives. How much does it cost to buy a tape drive to back up your new 120GB disk?
The best solution is the one that's made unavailable by most home broadband connections: back it up over the web to a central backup provider. They have the expensive tape drives and their marginal cost of backing up your computer is the cost of a tape and some network bandwidth. Here, though, we're all bitten by the asymmetric part of DSL or cable modems: we have a lot of download bandwidth, but not much upload.
its so true, you must be gay or something if you dont believe it. seriously, who backs stuff up?
Yup. When I can get 10 or 15 2in x 3in sized doo-hickey that can store 80+ gigs at under $20-$30 per doo-hickey, I may change.
you cannot get those features in the Doo-Hickey(tm) line of products. You will need to upgrade to the Widget(tm) line or - in the enterprise arena - to the Super-Widget(tm) family.
We look forward to assisting you with all your thingamabob needs.
Sincerely,
Bob Gadget, Marketing Weenie
Amalgamated Whatzit-Whozit-Howzit Industries
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Don't forget to test your backup tapes in a different deck. Sometimes the heads get out of alignment and the tapes can't be read on other drives.
Back up your worldwide, steganographied across your pr0n movies & pics collection.
Satisfaction guaranteed.
Tapes have their uses I suppose, if you're looking for bang-for-the-buck and reliability, and dealing with small systems.
But for most of what I'm seeing these days (100's of GB, as well as Teraybyte systems) that's irrelevant. The main factor I see is how fast can you do a complete restoration? Tapes suck badly at that.
I know one guy where I worked who told the owner it would take a month to restore a critical server if it was trashed. He was fired the next day, as well he should have been.
Give me a RAID system for backups. I get the best of most worlds. Add to it a tape system if it's needed. Hmmm. That's starting to sound like Tivoli.
Our little office still uses the old tr-3 tapes for daily/weekly backup for offsite storage. Along with a parallel port tape drive and an extra internal drive (one of my home computers is convertable into a temp server) stored offsite. If the office burns down i assume one day vs a few hours will be pretty irrelevent since there wont be anything to plug it into anyways! System also has a backup on the opposite HD from the data. Dont recall the last time i ever used either to restore to time to restore is not an issue with us. Our old backup program doesnt do cd/dvd without intervention and i see no reason to spend money on hardware AND software when the overnight automatic backup to old tapes works fine. Unfortunately most new computers seem to barf up on these old drives (floppy cable driven) so the next box HAS to be upgraded :/
Our new unix system uses a dds tape as will the replacement for our current unit soon. The little dds tapes are a nicer pocket size anyways ;)
Well, not by much. It's like 10% higher throughput and you can put a full 200GB, uncompressed, on one tape.
And at a price point under 50 cents to the gigabyte. Woooo.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Glad that tapes work for you in Virginia. I live in the tropics where the air is balmy and airconditioning is at a premium. Tape media of any kind rots here. It is nothing to pick up a stored VHS tape and find it coated in a thick frosting of white mold.
This is why I record everything neatly on coconut husks:P
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
And of course, tape backups require storage space --something that is often in short supply. So offsite storage, like Iron Mountain, etc. get to reap rewards off this as well.
However, that's also the biggest problem with tape backup. Here's an example:
For about a year I was system administrator at an investment firm. When they needed something restored from backup, they needed it restored immediately, because anywhere from $200k to $1mil was being lost each hour the file was gone. Most of the time, this was not a problem, because we kept a month's worth of backups at any given time, and then one backup at the end of each month, for one year, on-site. An average of about 40 tapes, counting the ones in the server at that time.
Well no matter how well-prepared one tries to be, someone always finds a way to 'eff it up. A particular file had to be restored from exactly a point in previous months that we did not have on-site. Which means we had to make an appointment with our offsite-storage to deliver the tapes from that particular month, and of course, they couldn't get it out there till the next day, and when they delivered the tapes, it was the wrong set. There's more trauma to the story, but eventually we ended up with a 3-day turnaround to get the file loaded, which cost the company just about what that account was worth. Fortunately there was enough of a paper trail to save my job, but no one was happy.
As more and more companies require instant gratification in order to remain profitable, there needs to be a faster method of data reclaimation than tapes and off-site storage. Perhaps backing up to a remote system that keeps solid archives on an array of multi-terabyte drive is the way to go...I honestly don't know. But while I have to agree tape drives are reliable and cost-effective for most, their lifespan for "minute-by-minute" companies is rather limited by their lack of speed.
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
If nothing else this makes the case for implementing remote backup on a massive scale to the Great Big Tape Drive in the Sky. These Ginormous Silos are great for huge service providers that actually have a need to manage a few PetaBytes but they only make sense if you can connect huge numbers of backup clients to them (via a storage network SAN/NAS with lots of intermedia staging servers of course).
We've used these beasts on site and some of them are so large they need their own fire code certification.
...TAPE is a four letter word.
For home use, get a ancient PC, put a good hard drive in it, install Linux with Bacula (www.bacula.org) & only backup your data (not the entire OS) directly to disk. In the long run you'll be much farther ahead on cost & performance. If you ever have a crash, re-install the OS then restore the data.
I salvaged an 11 year old 486-66DX with 24mb ram. Put a 120GB HD in it, an ethernet card, and installed Debian with Bacula. All together it cost me less than $100 to provide a backup solution for three PCs. Everything is scheduled to backup automatically & I get emails if something doesn't work.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. Businesses obviously have different priorities.
The VXA tapes from Exabyte have guaranteed backwards compatibility. Read, and write. As the drives move up to the newer models, they just cram more data onto the same tapes. Pretty sweet tech, as far as I'm concerned.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
If you don't care about offsite storage then tape backup isn't neccesarily for you, but I can assure you, as a server admin, that there is nothing quite like the feeling of taking your backup tapes home with you every night, knowing that they are safe under your pillow in case of emergency. It gives you a great sense of security and calm.
The 40GB Travans I barely noticed, but we've moved up to 400GB Ultriums, and they are making my pillow quite uncomfortable these days!
Mmmm, Overland Storage Powerloader
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
that is why I have lying around at home severl "old" backup systems that work with linux. I have a 9track desktop drive with a ISA card to interface to a PC and it can be read by linux as well as a bernulli drive and a couple of other older drives.
do I use them? nope. but the Bernoulli made me about $3500.00 one weekend when a company was referred to me by an associate that desperately needed data off them.
I'm betting the 9track tape drive will again net me another $1000 to $2000 in a year or two for someone that really needs the data read and converted from EBCDIC to ASCII.
and the guys that helped me fish it out of the trash though I was nuts.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
FWIW: I was told by someone who should know that the tape manufacturers have set a common goal to keep the cost of data on tape at 1/10 of data on disk.
Anyone else heard this?
For those tape advocates out there, here's a chance to one up those "I'd rather just use hard drives for backup" folks.
Can anyone actually reccomend a good, stable home tape backup solution that costs less than $200 (hardware and media) to backup, say, 250GB of data nightly? Linux or Windows (preferably both).
I've dabbled with some used 8mm backup media and hardware before, but the hardware was too old and tended to fail a lot. I just gave up. And I rarely (heck, lets say never) see cheap tape backup options at my local computer hardware shop or Future Shop or Staples type store.
I was talking hosting center backup options the other day with my boss. He's a Mac guy. Terribly devoted to Apple, blindly devoted to anything open source (regardless of immediate return on invested time/effort), and horribly anti-Microsoft.
That, said, he has lectured me over and over again about how he hates tapes. He never gives a decent reason, except that they're slow to restore stuff. Now, I'm new to IT support (web development/multimedia design by trade), so I just let my eyes glaze over and wait for him to get to the part where tapes can be tied back to Bill Gates and the Evil Microsoft (I'll spare you the use of the $ in that word) Empire. When he's finished, I just sort of nod my head and mention that there are newer, faster tape technologies out there that we could look into.
And then I mention cost. It's my understanding that these newer, faster tape solutions are really dang expensive, particularly for small businesses. Autoloaders and all that -- I've browsed the Dell website and been all but floored at some of the pricing on these things.
In the end, I'm left with either recommending a shoddy USB/Firewire hard drive backup for certain servers (like that's reliable) or going back to the drawing board. I can only pray that my boss' lack of acceptance of this technology (and advances in said technology) won't come back to bite him (and the company) in the ass when a server goes down.
IronChefMorimoto
Digital Audio Tape
Someone else mentioned VHS backup, and ISTR seeing that years back. But there's one other hitch with VHS - it won't fit into a drive bay. DAT, or at least a 2nd or 3rd generation DAT drive would fit into a drive bay, and was meant to store digital data, (duh) unlike VHS. It's density wasn't the best, out the door, but one can hope for denser versions, and a 'music device' would require backward compatibility.
But horror of horrors, DAT might be used to pirate music, so therefore it's a technology that MUST be suppressed! And suppressed, it was. So the opportunity for a device that might well have had the right charactaristics to become a ubiquitous backup device, even for Joe 6Pak, is gone.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Once you develop something else that comes close to the cost, and ease, of backing up several TB in an evening like you can do with a DLT + autoloader, then we can talk about tapes being dead..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Tape is a great medium for reliable backup of larger data volumes for corporate users, and I believe it will continue to be so for a long time.
For backing up your personal workstation(s) at home tape has been gradually replaced by cdrw and later by dvd±rw. Tape drives for personal backup have not been able to keep up with the growth of disk capacity. Up until the later 90's one could buy reasonably priced tape drives and simply dump the content of ones entire hard drive onto a single cartridge. Unfortunately, todays tape drives that can do that are not priced for the consumer marked.
PS! My six year old Iomega Ditto is still serving its purpose!
As storage sizes and needs relentlessly increase, the serial nature of tape becomes an ever-greater penalty. Large, expensive hardware solutions can overcome this with parallelism. However, it's the cheap, commodity solutions that drive innovation and ultimately dominate the market, and that's hard disk backup solutions.
One of the primary barriers to the dominance of disk-to-disk backup is simply form factor. Large, cheap hard disks generally come with their electronic guts hanging out, and without an easy to plug/unplug connection. This is in the midst of change, however. Tiny form factor disks that were designed from scratch to be robust and carryable are increasing their capacities at a rapid pace. USB 2.0 and Fireware offer enough speed to be plausible connectors to backup drives.
Another factor to consider is that the rate of change of disk capacity increase is much greater than the rate of change of disk data transfer rate. Thus, image backups of disks are becoming impractical in many situations, and restoring from tape becomes even more tedious, as you try to wind to the desired version of a file in a vast body of backup data.
The fact that people who have a tape solution that works have no immediate need to switch to disk does not mean tape is not being displaced as a backup solution. We still have lots of mainframes being used; that does not mean that PCs did not usurp mainframes as the primary means of computing -- they certainly did.
No one with an effective tape backup solution today should drop it immediately. Tape backups will be around for years to come. Tape backups are being displaced by disk-to-disk backups. All three things are true and not at all contradictory.
That is why there aren't any real alternatives for backing up data. NOTHING should ever be backed up locally, because like you said, when fire hits, your backups are gone. If restoration time is a big deal, that means that the site itself is a big, which also means YOU WONT KEEP TAPES AT THAT LOCATION. You'll probably be keeping them somewhere close instead.
We use CA Brightstor in combination with a 50/100GB AIT tapes that makes nightly images of our critical servers. Should the server fail, we have a complete image of the server made daily and can restore the entire system in less than two hours. All the steps in restoration is documented on three sheets of paper so as long as you can read english and have poseable thumbs to hold the tapes, you can perform our restoration process.
Tape backup isn't anywhere near dead. Sure, some folks archive to optical as well...but there's no way you beat the raw capacity of tape systems. While we certainly have customers who do mirrored systems replicating data...essentially failover systems...you still have to save that stuff somewhere.
In the IBM distribution space where I operate, LTO2 is the primary tape device of choice at the moment. We've got LTO2 based drive options that can span everything from small installs to high end enterprise boxen with terabytes of data on one system, or multiple systems via fibre switches.
We also see action on the low end systems with internal tapes, usually QIC 30/60GB units, and some VXA 80GB units.
Bottom line - tape will be here for a LOOOONG time to come. In my view the next step is lower priced tape units for home users. With all the gigs of data more savvy customers are implementing, this will become more & more of an issue going forward. However, for most home users, an online HDD based backup may be adequate.
TGM.
And DLT is definitely no cheaper than LTO (same price for slightly less capacity).
Upfront price is anywhere from $1200 to $2000 for a single-slot tape drive of either variety, and $5000-$10000 for modestly configured autoloaders. (7 to 10 tapes, rackmount, possibly with two physical drive units)
This is not including a SCSI card and cables if you need them.
The reason why you do any of this is because you might want to be able to roll the system back to some earlier time, not just ensuring drive failure tolerance (people who buy such backup devices already are backing up a RAID volume). Also, tapes are easier to store than hard drives and they tend to break less easily if you man-handle them.
You are right. In the low end, automated or manual copying between hard disks is sufficient, with DVDs or CD-Rs useful for point-in-time archiving of logs, deliverables, etc.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I've had 3 different tape drives over the years and all have failed me when I needed them most. Granted these were consumer-grade drives, but at the 150-250USD I paid for each (+ 30USD/tape for my most recent, a Travan TR-5), they weren't exactly cheap.
first we had the Operating System crusades, then the browser wars... now backup preference battles... this is ridiculous!
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
In 1999, we had a raid array with a ton of disks, and two failed within minutes of each other. Due to various mistakes, it cost about $20,000 to recover the data.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
Seriously, it's not that hard to use a raid array on your server, copy the data to a backup array (or just mirror set, or even a stand alone drive), and also backup to tape. Take the tape offsite, keep the HD array onsite.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
that would read an old tape cut on tops-20?
Tape will die completely in favor of disk when these conditions are all true:
a) one drive stores more info than one tape (true today in most cases - as mentioned, tape capacities are increasing, but at a much slower rate than drive capacities.)
b) one drive costs less than equivalent tape storage (just about there, but not quite)
c) mechanisms exist for easy and fast off-site storage (answer hazy - ask later)
d) physical dimensions of drives shrink to that of same-capacity tapes (not terribly likely to happen in the near future - instead, this one will be satisfied by markedly higher disk capacities).
The reason why tapes have limited long-term viability is primarily one of restore speeds (but also for very large datasets, backup speeds). After all, you're taking backups to avoid loss of business continuity - you're gonna wait how long to restore a few terabytes of data from tape?
Most large shops are combining near-line disk storage with tape for archival purposes. I'd wager that the ratio of disk:tape for backup/restore purposes will only increase in the future.
sloth jr
I wish more people were using them so the prices would go down a bit ...
..... I just hate dragging a HDD around .... also for *NIX users it is just a nice thing to TAR straight onto the tape.......
... nut just drop into a dir and run stuff ...
.... but $600+ for a 12gig drive ... hmmm .... that is prices for me .... and 1200+ for a 36 GIG drive ....
Also it would be nice to have a dat drive in every household so you could walk around with a disposable data storage device
I think they are not popular since you have to work a bit more with that sequential access thing
tapes rule
Optical Drives and Hard Drives are Not comparable to systems like these, Just look at the specifications. It is a 300,000 (Yes, Three Hundred THOUSAND) Tape library system. It can hold UP TO 300 Gb per cart. With a total of 90PetaBytes of storage..
Now, Dont get me wrong, Those lovely little DVD burners are cute at 4-8Gb, But are not even a consideration when talking such large amounts of data. Also I would like to see the projected cost's for a system that can do 90Petabytes of storage to HDD, Would be extraordinarily expensive
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I've got 440GB of hard drive space on my primary PC, with about 250GB of it filled. Most of it is 'long-term' information that just won't fit on a DVD reasonably. (Lots of DV files, a few over 10GB in each single file.) I'd love to have a reasonably cheap, hands-off backup system that can handle that much data. I'd only need monthly 'full' backups of about 200GB. Then maybe weekly backups of the other 50GB. I'm sorry, but 10 DVD-RWs is a bit much. Even at 4x write speed, waiting 15 minutes, then swapping, then waiting 15 minutes more, then swapping again... It's not something I'd want to do even monthly. And forget about backing 200GB up to DVD, even once. (Yes, part of that 440GB is in the form of a 'backup' drive, but I'd like to have something with cheaper media that I can keep offsite, and preferably have more than one copy of. A 200GB external drive isn't cheap enough to buy 'a few' of to keep offsite.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Most of the business aspects of tape backup has been covered by previous posts. Large data centers cannot live without tape libraries AND offsite tape storage and rotation.
Those advocating RAID and such have to consider the offsite aspect.
I have been backing up my personal stuff on tape for 15 years. I used to make copies of my home directory (on UNIX) to a QIC tape that had a whopping 60 MB capacity. Later, I would use 150 MB QIC tapes. Since QIC drives were expensive, this was out of my reach at home. But there were plenty of those at work, and my stuff was on my machine at work.
When I started having Linux at home, I bought an HP Colorado 2.5GB/5GB Travan IDE tape drive. It worked well and I backed up stuff on it when my hard drive was just 2GB.
My home was broken into and the PC stolen. Those tapes came in handy, when I bought a used Seagate 10GB/20GB Travan IDE drive off eBay. I restored my home directory and everything was good to go. If I had bought another hard disk and copied stuff to it, all my data would have been gone forever! Remember that next time you say buy another disk!
I use a set of 6 tapes for weekly backup and 3 for monthly backups. The monthly ones are offsite, at a friend/co-worker's house. Even with removable hard disks, you can't justify the cost of 9 hard disks!
I use cron to start the backup on the early hours of the weekend. I even have another cron job the day before to check that the tape is inserted in the drive and that it has been rewind to the beginning of tape. The entire process is unattended, only for an email to tell me the backup is done, and to change the tape.
My backup is about 7 GB now for the home server, which contains my kids homework, my files, digital pictures, CVS repository, ..etc. So there still room on the tapes.
CD-Rs are too small, and so are DVDs (one would not fit my full backup). Maybe in the future things would change, but for the forseable future, it seems tapes are here to stay.
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No matter WHERE I've worked, it seems like our techs spend MORE time fighting with tape backup units...who NEEDS this crap???
It's only a small business about 10 gb of data and a minimal budget.
They had a Seagate travan IDE setup (4/8gb) and it was slow, unreliable and wearing out tapes too quick.
'
This new method (5x 2.5" ide notebook disks and a usb2 cradle (x5) means not only are the backups quicker but also the backup "tapes" (disks) themselves have at least a 1 year warranty.
It's definately a good solution for some small business's
I work for at an IBM data libary(currently at work actually). We have about 1.2 million tapes we manage(mostly 3480 and 3490). The main thing I notice about them is reliability. I can go get a tape from 1988 and still read it and write to it without problem, which with a cdr or HDD that has been written over many many times is unlikely. The are very tough too, I've dropedd many a stack of tapes and they never break. They are also very cheap, and it is quite easy to get thousands of them used an relabled for much more cheaply than the price of raid-5 arrays and new optical media. We can recover from a complete loss of this facility completely, and have simulated it before. We have nightly offsite backups of thousands of tapes. The hardare surrounding this is very reliable too. Storagetek silos can hold a few terabytes of tapes. These run 24/7 and very rarely do they fail. The drives themselves put at least a hundred tapes through a day, and mabey 3 tapes a day out of 150 drives gets cycling many tapes gets stuck so that it requires human intervention. With new tapes with higher capacities(and backwards compatability) and better automated systems I don't see these going out anytime soon. DVDs and HDDs are simply not rugged and maintenance free to transport many of them daily back and forth, and to use for many years without fail. First post :)
This is turning into a typical /. discussion. Guys who haven't had experience verus those who have. For those who want to use disk backups: Try that when you are backing up 3TB+ a day. It's all a question of scale.
.PSTs are evil) refreshes come along at 18 or 24 month intervals. This coincides nicely with the doubling in capacity that tape drive manufacturers produce.
Tape won't die becuase it's alredy been used for 30+ years and there is a load of data out there that needs to be kept. There is a significant market just keeping this alive. Although the tape manufactureers would love us to do it, it is very rarely viable to pull back and refresh all the media you generate. Net result is that large backup and achival systems, once in are there for keeps. This somewhat explains why initial capital costs are so high, as refreshes for SMEs are rare. In orgs that have rampant out of control data growth ( this is most believe me - sub rant:
The real killer though is not the hardware but the software, keeping old backup systems alive to restore your old media is a nightmare. Anyone tried to restore an Novell system recently?
From my experiance with other companies 99% if not more of the issues that people have with their tape backup isn't the tape or the drive (they work well) its how they document how when and where they used the tape when it comes to retrieving something.
Use silica gel as a desiccant. Or, if silica gel is not available, use rice instead. Dry it in an oven before use.
The Russian ARVID line of VHS backup devices was in use during 90-s and used the standard VCRs. Arvid 1010 wrote 1 GByte per tape, 1020 - 2 GBytes, 1052 - 3.5 GBytes. I own 1020 and 1052.
They were very reliable and robust to tape failures due to the powerful error correction. But it's physically impossible to write more than 4 GBytes per tape without intervention to the VCR (I personally checked it since I wanted to make a clone with much higher capacity). So the tens-gigabyte HDDs killed the Arvid.
I have read about the similar US devices but they had much less capacity than Arvid.
Native uncompressed transfer rate of SDLT 320 is 16 MB/s
So LTO-2 is a 25% faster standard.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
There was a hot spare. It took care of the first drive failure. The second drive failure was the knock out - while the array was rebuilding on the hot spare.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
That...was...awesome. Seriously, was your dad the guy who didn't install the sand filters?
Back up the write logs. From those, you can recreate the tables. That's what they're there for. Then, you're backing up incrementally and not taking a snapshot of your entire DB every night. ;)
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
for archiving purposes. I'm telling you, i'm just rounding of a project at work for replacing a tape library as our main backup solution with an EMC CX700 Disk array. Ofcourse archival data will be flowed onto tapes, because it would be just wasting space keeping that 'dead data' on the disks for x years.
I will be keeping all backup data on said disk array for a week, which will allow me blazing fast restores with 100% reliability! older data will also be pushed off to tape, because basicly most restore requests come from data backed up the last week.
In the backup industry they use a fancy name for this called - Information Lifecycle Management.
I must admit those (proprietary) tape drives from STK are fast (and also _very_ expensive), but it is not only about being fast. what you want is to have your backups running successfully and even more important is that your restores are working!
Keep these simple facts in mind; if you want to achieve the same speed and reliability of a disk array with a tape library you'll be spending almost as much as on a disk library.
In my evaluation of disk vs tape, the tape won only on two points: it uses a lot less electricity and the tape cartridges can be moved around much easier then disks.
I'm so sick and tired of dealing with tapes for doing primary backups of a _large_ data center.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The tape drive is now fixed... So I grabbed all of our outdated backups and some hammers, rounded up the staff, went outside, and we vented some stress. ;-)
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso