What would you say if I where hosting off of servers rented from a company like Rackshack, about conducting backups using reletively cheap USB 2 external hard drives, instead of purchasing a whole machine to backup files.


So if a server goes down, we could simply restore everything from the external drives, which is analogous to larger companies backing up data to tape drives.

Originally posted by Lord MJ
What would you say if I where hosting off of servers rented from a company like Rackshack, about conducting backups using reletively cheap USB 2 external hard drives, instead of purchasing a whole machine to backup files.


So if a server goes down, we could simply restore everything from the external drives, which is analogous to larger companies backing up data to tape drives.

The reason people back up to tape is because tape is cheap. You pay a one-time cost for the hardware and a repeated low cost for media.

USB2 drives are expensive and you are limited to the size of them by current technology, whatever it is at any given time.

If you grow from backing up 80GB to 120GB, and oyu only have a 80GB USB2 drive, then you have to buy a new USB2 drive to accomodate the larger amount of space.

If you grow from backing up 80GB to 120GB and use tape media, you simply span your backups across two 80GB tapes instead of one. This is assuming your tape media is 80GB capacity, of course. Some are larger, some are smaller.

See how using tape backup allows for more flexibility at a lower cost?

I suggest you research VXA-1 devices. They are reliable and reasonably-priced. http://www.vxa.com/

Also AIT2 technology is currently at a good price/capacity point, IMO.

VXA-1 transfers at 3/mb/sec - isn't this slow? What about if you attached another SCSI hdd, matched in size to your primary, and have like a shell script or something copy data at X intervals to the second drive - wouldnt that be alot faster? Also much cheaper, since when you go with tape the drives are expensive.

Is there something I'm missing? data integrity? security? hidden cost?

Am I possible missing something?

Why not just (assuming you use ensim) download backups each night.. that way, if something happens, you just upload the backups...

Maybe I don't know how the world of backing up stuff works, but that's how I thought you'd do it...

Originally posted by vivacity
VXA-1 transfers at 3/mb/sec - isn't this slow? What about if you attached another SCSI hdd, matched in size to your primary, and have like a shell script or something copy data at X intervals to the second drive - wouldnt that be alot faster? Also much cheaper, since when you go with tape the drives are expensive.

Is there something I'm missing? data integrity? security? hidden cost?

When you perform backups, SPEED does NOT matter. What matters is BACKUP CAPACITY.

because SCSI hard drives are expensive! A 36GB SCSI drive is three hundred dollars. Imagine if you have 120GB of data!

Tape MEDIA are cheaper than SCSI hard drives. Read my post again, and again, and again.

Call Exabyte or VXA up and ask them exactly what you posted.

Originally posted by Lirath
Am I possible missing something?

Why not just (assuming you use ensim) download backups each night.. that way, if something happens, you just upload the backups...

Maybe I don't know how the world of backing up stuff works, but that's how I thought you'd do it...

You got a good enough connection to download 100GB of data on a daily basis? I don't :)

You got that kind of money to pay for that traffic? I don't :)

That's 300000GB (-/+) of traffic per month.

Ahhh.. what exactly is a tape drive then?

Assuming you have a server at a place like RackShack, it the tape drive with them? or at your business.. if its at your business, aren't you downloading the data anyways?

Originally posted by Lirath
Ahhh.. what exactly is a tape drive then?

Assuming you have a server at a place like RackShack, it the tape drive with them? or at your business.. if its at your business, aren't you downloading the data anyways?

A tape drive is a (generally) SCSI device that you attach to a server, you then install software on the server that performs backups of your other server(s) on your network at a specified interval.

Some use 8mm media, similar to those you see in video cameras, for example.

That media is cheap--you can get AIT2 media that has 100GB capacity for $23 on Pricewatch.

When you need to back up more than 100GB, ytou simply buy more tape media. if you use a hard drive, you have to buy another hard drive.

What I mean is, any relatively fast harddrive.. I mean you can find a 160gb hdd (8mb cache) for around $270. Now this is no SCSI, still, the UltraATA transfer rate is 133MB/sec....uhh....ALOT more than the tap drive...and it's 160GB - that's alot of capacity!

To me it looks like a viable solution if you know you probably wont be storing over say X amount of gigabytes, so you dont have to go out and buy another HDD. It's cheap, and it's fast.

Unless of course I'm missing something? I probably am since I am not that well versed in hardware...

Originally posted by vivacity
What I mean is, any relatively fast harddrive.. I mean you can find a 160gb hdd (8mb cache) for around $270. Now this is no SCSI, still, the UltraATA transfer rate is 133MB/sec....uhh....ALOT more than the tap drive...and it's 160GB - that's alot of capacity!

To me it looks like a viable solution if you know you probably wont be storing over say X amount of gigabytes, so you dont have to go out and buy another HDD. It's cheap, and it's fast.

Unless of course I'm missing something? I probably am since I am not that well versed in hardware...

Yes, you are missing the fact that you can only have two IDE drives per bus...which means unless you have a motherboard with RAID, you limit your expansion.

Also, UltraATA 133 BURSTS at 133MB/s and in real life comes no where near that. IDE is also controlled by your CPU which means less processing for web serving etc.

Regardless, when it comes to backup, performance is not what matters. Reliability and ease of growth are what matter.

In terms of price, it is important to remember that a tape device is a ONE TIME cost--it is NOT recurring. So comparing the price of a hard drive to a tape device is not exactly apples and apples.

But, you'll do what you want. I am just telling you what the wisest solution is (it is generally never a good idea to assume you're not going to expand), based on my experience as a sysadmin for the #1 and #2 (maybe #3, its arguable) biggest names in the computer industry.

You guys should read this Slashdot article.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/08/2238227

Originally posted by scott77

When you perform backups, SPEED does NOT matter. What matters is BACKUP CAPACITY.


Umm, yeah, it can matter. If your backups take too long, you can't run them everywhere 24 hours. If they take too long and are sometimes delayed or interrupted, you'll miss your 24 hour schedule. And if it takes that long to backup, it will take that long to restore as well, which is something often overlooked.

Kevin

Originally posted by sigma


Umm, yeah, it can matter. If your backups take too long, you can't run them everywhere 24 hours. If they take too long and are sometimes delayed or interrupted, you'll miss your 24 hour schedule. And if it takes that long to backup, it will take that long to restore as well, which is something often overlooked.

Kevin

First of all, you don't want to do full backups on a daily basis, you do incrementals--only what's changed.

And generally you only restore a portion of your backed-up data. If you have to restore your whole site from tape then you've got bigger fish to fry than it taking a long time.

6MB/s is fast enough. If you have so much data that you need to backup at a faster rate than this, you're not going to be sitting in this forum asking why getting an IDE drive for backup is a bad idea.

This is my last response to this topic, if you still don't understand the pros and cons of using a tape device then you probably shouldn't be in this business, go flip some hamburgers or something :stickout

Originally posted by scott77

6MB/s is fast enough. If you have so much data that you need to backup at a faster rate than this, you're not going to be sitting in this forum asking why getting an IDE drive for backup is a bad idea.

This is my last response to this topic, if you still don't understand the pros and cons of using a tape device then you probably shouldn't be in this business, go flip some hamburgers or something :stickout

I should point out that I am not the original poster and I am not asking the original poster's question. I am simply stating that for large backup sets, the speed of the tape system can and does matter. This only becomes clear once you've worked with really large backup sets.

And of course when a server needs a complete restore, everyone wants it done quickly - that is the main problem.

Kevin