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We are looking into upgrading our backup system to something more resilient/reliable than our current system, which consists of 2 x 300GB firewire drives that we rotate from one night to the next and do a full backup of our file server, deleting the previous backup. In this way we always have one complete backup, whcih is taken home with us at night, and if anything were to go wrong, we would only have a 24hour loss of data.
Quite a simple setup really, but firewire drives are fragile, and we have some large animation projects which take up around 50GB or so which we would like to archive and get off our system entirely. Most completed projects are archived to CDs. Larger projects to DVDs. Large animation jobs to firewire drives.
We have upgraded our server to a RAID 5 system with 800GB total storage capacity. In an ideal world, we would want a backup system that has a capacity of 800GB also so that if we were using the full capacity (which we aren't likely to do) we could get it all on one tape if required.
However, the largest capacity (native) tape backup solution we can find is 400GB. As most of our data is compressed to some extent anyway, the 2:1 compression ratios that companies talk about is largely irrelevant for us.
So, what do most people use as a backup system? Would we, for example, need to keep our total 'backupable requirement' (what a term!) to under 400GB, or be more 'selective' in what we actually do backup?
Our current total data useage is around 300GB or so, so we are fine for the moment. But if we get a few large animation jobs, or have a number of jobs that we need to keep online for extended periods of time, we are going to need to resort to tape-spanning, which, although better than using Winzip to span 1.44" floppy disks, can also cause problems as backups occur overnight, and there isn't anyone around to switch tapes when one becomes full.
I am interested to hear what people use in our field.
Quite a simple setup really, but firewire drives are fragile, and we have some large animation projects which take up around 50GB or so which we would like to archive and get off our system entirely. Most completed projects are archived to CDs. Larger projects to DVDs. Large animation jobs to firewire drives.
We have upgraded our server to a RAID 5 system with 800GB total storage capacity. In an ideal world, we would want a backup system that has a capacity of 800GB also so that if we were using the full capacity (which we aren't likely to do) we could get it all on one tape if required.
However, the largest capacity (native) tape backup solution we can find is 400GB. As most of our data is compressed to some extent anyway, the 2:1 compression ratios that companies talk about is largely irrelevant for us.
So, what do most people use as a backup system? Would we, for example, need to keep our total 'backupable requirement' (what a term!) to under 400GB, or be more 'selective' in what we actually do backup?
Our current total data useage is around 300GB or so, so we are fine for the moment. But if we get a few large animation jobs, or have a number of jobs that we need to keep online for extended periods of time, we are going to need to resort to tape-spanning, which, although better than using Winzip to span 1.44" floppy disks, can also cause problems as backups occur overnight, and there isn't anyone around to switch tapes when one becomes full.
I am interested to hear what people use in our field.
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