Advice on Offline Backups

[tv]

Hi All,

Don't know if this is related..

We are a small creative agency using all macintosh. we'd like to have some advice on offline backups wether tapes, hard drives or whatsoever on what to use and want to hear also some other companies on what's their experience using them. An offline backup that we can take at home and feeling secured that we have all the backup that is also easy to use and friendly. A backup that we can rotate weekly or monthly.

Currently our data is just less than 500 GB and the user's data for 20 macintosh clients & databases are about 500 GB. Per week it will grow like less than 150 MB. Our target is to backup all the Data and user's file and emails.

I am new to this offline backups and I do not know where to start. We are having Retrospect 6.1 on our small studio that is temporarily backing up all the data and users data to a firewire 800 disk configured as RAID1. any advice on what to use?

BRU or Retrospect? Firewire or ScSi tape devices? Firewire drives? Blu-ray I don't know. Please share your experiences.

any advice?

[abstractrude]

ther are so many ways to backup your data. I use bakbone netvault with an LTO4 library.

I have decided to expand my answer. There is so much that goes into planning a good backup strategy. LTO4 is the best option for Tape hands down. Getting a library that supports LTO4 is important. The tapes are fast and you get 800Native/1600Compressed storage on a single tape. That blows away Blu-Ray and most other offline options. The LTO4 option is also pretty fast. I usually get about 50-80 megabytes a second on my LTO tapes. That being said we need to remember Xsan doesn't do its best with small files. My backups take substantially longer in graphics even though their is 1/4 the amount of data as the backup server reads out video files faster.

If you do not know traditional IT tape based backup policies I recommend doing some research. Media needs to be rotated and jobs need to account for holes in the system. For example what do you do if a tape goes bad or someone drops it being put back in for restore. Multiple rotating backups based on the following standards are considered complete. Here is a quick overview of my method taught by a UNIX admin to me.

Monthly-Full-1 (Entire File System,assests etc.) 60 Day cycle Every other month
Weekly-Full-1 (Work Data,Video, Graphics Etc)
Daily-INC-1 (Runs nightly incremental based of the weekend backup)

Monthly-Full-2 (Entire File System,assests etc.) 60 Day cycle Every other month
Weekly-Full-2 (Work Data,Video, Graphics Etc)
Daily-INC-2 (Runs nightly incremental based of the weekend backup)This runs even on the off week for the weekly.

If you were to lose everything, you would restore the Monthly first that has your assets and stuff that doesnt change much including any nearline, then restore your daily thats based off the weekly and bam you have everything.

Tape backup can be extremely complicated, that being said it can and does work. Choose a good library, I am not a fan of quantum but they work. Try to get a Library that has Fibre Channel Native LTO4 drives, they makes thing flexible and fit into your Xsan environment nicely(Fibre).

With the small amount of data you have, this can be achived for a few thousand dollars.
http://www.quantum.com/Products/TapeDrives/LTOUltrium/LTO-4HH/Index.aspx

http://www.bakbone.com/product.aspx?id=1306

http://www.digitape.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=PD095A&Store_Code=D&Category_Code=LTO4DRIVE

[Ernesto Sanchez]

Hi there,

Sounds like a Blu-Ray based solution fits the bill for your small datasets. The other route is to get a desktop LTO drive and Bru Software for a very inexpensive archive solution. Check out the forums at Reduser.net for details. Just do not archive to hard-drives and put them on a shelf. This is OK for maybe 6 months but not for a long term solution. There are a-lot of good articles on stiction and other phenomenon that damage drives when they are not spinning.


Cheers,
Ernesto