[DCN-TechOps] Re: [DCN-Webteam] Advice on tape backup system

[Jason Aller]

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Anne Hance wrote:

> Please excuse the liberty of using these lists for a non DCN question.
>
> Explorit is in need of a tape backup system for regular backup of its
> local server. I believe that the space involved is about  20 GB.
>
> Any suggestions of good items or of specific hardware  to avoid?
>
> Many thanks for your thoughts.

I've got a few questions that might help you get better suggestions.

What is the rate of change in the data? Is it mostly fixed, with 10%
changing in a year, or would it all potentially change during a month?

How often do you want to backup? How much work is at risk if you backup
once a week versus every night?

Does this include financial data? Employee records? Are there legal
concerns?

Who within the organization can request a restore? How often will restores
happen? Will they only be done in case of catastrophic failure?

What OS is the server running?

Do you want to use an offsite storeage facility, or will someone be
responsible for taking the backups home?

Without any of the answers I'm tempted at this point to suggest buying two
20 gig external hard drives and who ever does backup brings one in and the
working drive gets mirrored, and then that drive goes offsite and the
other one comes on. It's not a foolproof system, and I'd suggest testing
it once in a while to make sure that you can retrieve a file. It also
suffers from not being able to go back more than two iterations at any
given point. Again, this is without knowing any of the specifics, but
would be a good place to start from.

I've hung a lot of tape in my day and the one thing that I know is that
one large nine track tape in more than enough to make a hammock out of,
but that is a story for another time.

--
J.R. Aller -- jraller at dcn.davis.ca.us