Options for new backup plan

[corndawg]

Hello Everyone,

We are currently looking for a new backup plan for our Dell PowerEdge 1800. Currently we are running a dat72 tape drive. The problem is our data has outgrown the capacity of this solution. I know there are a couple of options available but I'm not sure what would be the best. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Things that come to mind are:

1) Get another higher capacity tape driver ( i think it's a SCSI 160 interface)

2) Move to an external HDD ( i'm not sure how much slower if any this would be)

3) Get an add-in card (USB 3.0, etc) and a something like a 126GB flash drive (not sure how reliable this is)

If there are any other suggestions or questions, let me know.

Thanks in advance,

 

[hang-the-9]

Home use, external drive. Enterprise, tape backups, or a RAID1 or 5 NAS.

 

[corndawg]

It is a work server and the owner is looking for a solution that will allow him to take the data off site in case of fire, etc. Sticking with the tape drive at higher capacity is the better of options??

 

[hang-the-9]

With tapes you can do a rotation schedule of tapes, and do off-site storage as well.

If you use a hard-drive, you'd have to either buy a bunch of drives and keep taking one off site, or have to keep moving the data off.

Have you looked at any of the "cloud" storage services? About as off-site as you can get. You con combine onsite drive backups for quick file recovery with off-site cloud storage.

 

[corndawg]

Yeah, we do the daily rotation with tapes now. He's not interested in the cloud. So tapes seem to be the way to go. Just didn't know if a flash drive on an internal add in card or something like that might be faster.

With that being said, we currently have a dat72 tape drive...we would just need to replace that drive with a bigger one like a dat160 or dat320 and get the media eh?

Also, which type of interface would have better xfer rates..SCSI or SATA? Sorry about the noob questions, I've built my own computers before, but haven't dealt with SCSI and we don't have an IT guy per se.. I know the general SATA comes in 3 speeds and the newer can be done with add in cards through PCIex if that is any better or SAS (whatever that is)

Thanks again

 

[corndawg]

Best answer selected by corndawg.

 

[hang-the-9]

SCSI should be OK if you can find current drives with that. The limit will not be the interface really but the speed of the media.

A solid state or a hard drive for backups will work well, but it's tougher to rotate those and use for off-site storage.

SCSI was good when ATA was around as it had a lot better management of data streams and was capable of handling a lot of processing for itself instead of using CPU/motherboard resources. Unless you are running a data center or have a need for very fast disk throughput like in a large critical database, you don't need SAS, those disks are very expensive. SATA should do fine, unless you get a tape drive that uses SAS then it's OK to get. I'm actually running a 15,000 SAS drive on my home PC, and have another with a regular SATA drive, don't see much difference unless I run a benchmark.