G+_Jason Williams Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 I will be building a new server soon for a small business & looking for a good removable backup solution. The current server has a tape backup that has been failing for several months now. Currently relying on Carbonite as the sole backup solution but would like to put a local backup solution back in place for redundancy. Should I stick with tape or is there something better / more reliable? Thanks, Jason Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Brandon Jasper Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 I use tape for archival purposes. I have a relatively recent LTO-6 tape setup though. Older tape isn't the best for reliability during restores but LTO-5 and up is pretty robust. The downside is the drives will cost about $3k. I also use them for offsite. My onsite backup is handled with a disk based RDX system for offline. I have redundant RAID 6 arrays for online which the offlines will stream from. It depends on how much data you're backing up, how important that data is, and how much money you have to spend. If it's only a single server look at RDX. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 I've been using usb3 external hard drives. Not the perfect solution because a hard drive is still involved. Let's me easily create backups to take off site, which is needed (460k internet connection won't cut it.). I use Seagate Backup series usb3 drives, but about any good USB drive will work. Ideally we'd have tape, but the tapes cost the same as a USB hard drive. Makes paying 3k for a tape drive painful in comparison. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Brandon Jasper Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 Travis Hershberger take a look at RDX. There are USB3 drives and while the cartridges are a little more expensive but cheaper than tape in total. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Travis Hershberger Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 I've known about those RDX drives for quite some time, but ultimately they're still just a portable hard drive. They still don't count as another type of media in my book for the 2 in the 3-2-1 rule. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Brandon Jasper Posted January 28, 2015 Share Posted January 28, 2015 They're hard drives, yes, but ones optimized for backup and ruggedness. We classify them as a removable media like tape. Though any archived data goes on tape because of it's lower error rate and long term storage stability. We've looked at Sony's ODA but it's very expensive. Practically the important thing in 3-2-1 is one of your onsite copies should be offline. It doesn't matter what media it's on as long as it can be restored quickly and reliably. RDX works for that. The industry is going to disk backups and reserving tape for archival purposes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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