Affordable Backup Hardware for Today's Systems? 22
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."
Affordable storage (Score:4)
Try Ecrix (Score:2)
Re:Hard disks? (Score:2)
Onstream DI30 and ADR50 are good (Score:1)
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.
DVD? (Score:1)
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
Re:DVD? (Score:1)
Alas, that would be far too small. 7 gigs is insignificant compared to the size of today's hard disks. It would take 10 of them just to back up one disk. :(
(And, typically, multimedia stuff is already compressed.)
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8mm (Score:2)
Re:Hard disks? (Score:1)
Re:Try Ecrix (Score:3)
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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And the 2nd backup set goes where? (Score:2)
Fortress Technologies "SPS protocol" (Score:1)
Re:Hard disks? (Score:1)
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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Neat box from HP (Score:1)
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 [hp.com] 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.
Re:Try Ecrix (Score:1)
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Hard disks? (Score:2)
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 [axis.com] from AXIS [axis.com]. 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 [slashdot.org] many here on
Fight the power! Forget the tapes!
Re:Try Ecrix (Score:1)
THis is my suggestion for bang for buck in tape solutions. We were useing an Onstream Tape drive...a and my biggest complaint w/ that was speed. Too Damn Slow!
Removable hard drives! (Score:2)
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...
Re:Try Ecrix (Score:1)
On the other hand, I also use HP DDS3 drives, you can get about 24 gigs compressed per drive. They aren't screamers, but they work correctly.
Re:Removable hard drives! (Score:1)
Re:Hard disks? (Score:1)
That will help against harddisk crashes. But what if don't need the data anymore for the moment, but maybe again next year. Or what if a user made a mistake and modified some data in a not so fortunate way and you need the files, like the where a week ago?
Under these circumstances tape-backups a quite handy.
Re:Hard disks? (Score:2)
Re:Hard disks? (Score:1)