Back it up...I'll take it

October 6, 2005 10:37 AM

I've taken the role as a graphic designer at a small company, and I also wear the IT hat sometimes. That being said, I'm more of a Mac Guru than (blech) XP. BUT, we have a small file server (40 GB, half full) of data we would like to backup nightly. #1: What's a good tape drive (or other media) for that much data, with room to grow, of course. #2: What software? #3: What's a "typical" backup schedule. I'd prefer just to do incrementals, but how often to rotate tapes/etc...? Thanks!
posted by Wiggo to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

for that amount of data we (the company I work for) suggest 2 external FireWire drive (100GB) that get backed up and one gets taken off site, next day/week swap the drives out again. We have clients use Retrospect. Best of luck.
posted by ShawnString at 11:22 AM on October 6, 2005

I've used Syncback and it works well to schedule the incremental backup of files. It costs $25.

Another option is to back up over the Internet. We've used Backup Solutions for this and it works perfectly. It takes a long time to upload the originals, but then it just does incremental backups.
posted by gus at 12:36 PM on October 6, 2005

I was a reseller for SwapDrive for a long time, they also are a remote-internet backup solution.
posted by phearlez at 12:40 PM on October 6, 2005

I run the backups for a large company. I put them on DLT with Backup Exec. I don't run much of a schedule. Every night, everything is backed up. I don't want to bother with incrementals in the event of catastrophic failure.
posted by kc0dxh at 12:43 PM on October 6, 2005

Not to be a yes man but we do as kc0dxh does and it works perfectly for us. Also, be sure to run a regular rotation of the tapes.
posted by horseblind at 12:48 PM on October 6, 2005

Oh, by regular rotation of tapes I mean that it takes us a couple of months to go through a set but we have a huge tape library. I would say if this is a small to medium place have enough tapes to rotate once every week or two (5-14 tapes depending on your particular setup.) Certainly run the backup everyday. Also, DDS4 is less expensive than DLT or Super-DLT. A DDS4 tape holds 20GB Native (uncompressed) to 40GB Compressed. I definitely vote for Backup Exec.
posted by horseblind at 12:58 PM on October 6, 2005

I asked a question about USB/Firewire RAID 1 (mirroring) solutions a while back.

Over the years I've used a variety of storage media for backups... CDs, Iomega Stuff, Tape, DVDs... but I just find myself becoming frustrated with keeping track of the media, wondering if the backup to the media was safe, and then dealing with backing up onto multiple media (or finding a new, higher capacity media) as hard drive storage size grows.

I've finally decided that backing up onto a good, data-redundant hard drive system is probably the answer. A solution like this is probably what I'll be going with.
posted by weston at 1:04 PM on October 6, 2005

I want to chime in about the question that Weston linked.

If this stuff is mission critical...get a Raid 1 asap. Then you'll sleep at night.
posted by filmgeek at 1:43 PM on October 6, 2005

This is more of a disaster recovery as a concept answer. It's doubtful that maximal uptime is a requirement, but it sure couldn't hurt. If files go on a server the everyone in the firm uses, it'd probably be best to do RAID5 setup. No matter how many people would be affected by downtime, it still costs money. Swap the wonky drive out, slap another one in and rebuild from the remaining good ones. If you do go this way, go for a RAID1 on the server OS drives, and raid 5 on 6 for data. But this goes beyond what was asked.

As far as tape backups go. Phenh, it used to be that you had to worry about legal data retention for financial records. All the while calculating how many tapes you needed in a year and how many you were going to stow at the end of the year and where.

Maxtor provides a one-touch small business solution with up to 300GB capacity. Set it and forget it, just watch the capacity.
posted by mnology at 2:36 PM on October 6, 2005

My small office has about that amount of data to back up as well. We run a full daily backup, using Backup Exec and DLT tapes like kc0dxh said. Even if the DLT tapes are expensive, they are both durable and easy to store, and can hold all of the data on the server on one tape.

We have a tape for each day - Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday - that each get re-used each week. We also have two Wednesday tapes that get rotated in, and one of those tapes is always off site. Wednesday is a good day for this, as holidays tend to fall on either Mondays or Fridays.

At the beginning of each quarter, we do a full backup to another off-site tape (which gets reused next quarter) as well as a write-only DVD backup that is kept as a snapshot of the server through time.

This system works very well for us.
posted by gemmy at 3:17 PM on October 6, 2005

Tape is supposed to be stored vertically, not laying on its side. Over time, gravity will cause the tape to sag a little, the bottom edge is longer than the top, and it goes unreadable.
(That's from Palindrome, bought out by Gateway, now I believe long defunct, and tape might be made better now, but what have you got to lose?)
posted by unrepentanthippie at 4:53 PM on October 7, 2005