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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."
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.
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.
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.
Although, we *do* also use live HD backups as part of our backup procedure -- just for a single nights backup. Sometimes you need to go back 5 or more days...
Cheap tape systems are a lifetime of agony. I'd recommend a used DLT drive over a new 8mm/DAT/DDS drive. DLT just *works*. When it needs cleaning, it tells you via a LED, not mysterious backup job failures, etc
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.
We want to backup lots of stuff over 40Gb. May I introduce you to my good friend the autoloader?
Moreover, we use good ol' DDS-3 tapes. Cheap, reliable, fixed standards. We can't read anything new, but we don't have to; it's not like tape is supposed to be a portable medium.
As many posters have pointed out, tape Just Works, and it works damn well. Speed is the only issue we have, but we still do full backups of our major servers every night. Frankly, your idea of "a remote backup site" (over Internet? Hah!) would take just as long as tape, or longer.
Another one bites the dust
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?
Ebay's definitely the way to go. Good tape drives, being corporate-targeted fare, are built to last. And there are plenty of servers that came with a tape drive as a standard component that probably never saw more than a couple of dozen backups in their lifetime. That means a cheap, long-lasting tape drive for you.
To give you an idea, I got a Sony DDS4 (20G/40G tapes) about a year and a half ago for ~$275, IIRC. By looking at it, it was barely used, though eyeballs are admittedly pretty weak instruments here. In any event, it's been running weekly backups with no problems at all - no write errors, doesn't chew up tapes, test restores always work. Good enough deal for me...
It's easy to justify. What's the life expectancy of that $100 DVD drive? How easy can you automate backups with it? How do you plan on automating the DVD-swap when you break 4 gigs (or 8 gigs for that matter)? How reliable is the media and how often do you need to replace it? In 10 years, I've had no tape drives bust on me. A few TAPES, but not the drives. Can't say that for CDRW drives. I can't really speak about DVD-Rs, but I'm sure low-cost consumer versions are just as brittle.
Once a backup procedure is in place, it's simply a matter of cycling tapes, grep'in the logs and emailing/sms'ing any alerts. Every friday, send a tape off site, every monday get back the old off-site tape. Replace tapes as they break or after 1 year of service.
While your DVD drive might work, you're pretty much stuck in front of it swapping out 5-10 DVD-Rs for every 40 gigs of data. What fun. Me? I like to go home and sleep during backup cycles. Then scan the logs in the morning. It takes me all of about 30 seconds (including swapping the tapes).