tape, ext HD or dvd backup?

[tricky]

Happy New Year to All!

We have various large projects that need backing up - 30-70GB in size. Usually, we backup projects to DVD or CD for archival. However, with larger projects, I was wondering about exterior hard drives - say 80-100GB drives. Then I thought, what about and external USB DAT drive which will take 36/72GB tapes? Wouldn't these be more resilient. Obviously, the native capacity is only 36GB, and as most audio/image/video data is already compressed, we wouldn't get anything like the 72GB-per-tape, but spanning two tapes would be easier than multiple DVDs, and tapes are surely more resilient than external hard disks - i.e. you could drop them without worrying!

Any thoughts on this? Are tapes the way to go these days?

From a cost point of view they seem OK - an exterior 36/72GB Dat drive would be about £300, and the tapes are about £10 each. Compared to buying new hard disks (two sets) for every archived project (about £100 each for a 100GB), it seems pretty good.

[geoff]

We used to use tapes.
I (eventually) managed to convince them to stop because I could never get anything off of them! Had several IT people set it up, but didn't trust it in the end. If you wanted one file it had search through the whole tape, plus you have to remeber to change the tape every day or twice a week whatever.

With an external hard drive which we now use, you can check very quickly that the backup is working. All I have to do is remeber to stick it my bag every night. We have been broken into several times so the backup is for off-site.
I would also recommend a backup over the net of key files

Geoff

[tricky]

Good points. The difference with what I am proposing is that it is for 'archival' backup as opposed to day-to-day backups, which we too use external hard disks for.

[dapeter]

Well I've been looking into getting an Iomega REV drive, they have pretty good capacity and throughput for the price.

I've read reviews though that say since it's not hardware compression (like most tape drives) the CPU runs at around 40% usage during backups, so you'd want to backup/archive overnight.

[tricky]

Just took a look at that REV drive - it seems like a nice idea, but isn't it just yet another format which may only stay around for a relatively short time?

[travistlo]

I back up each project when finished onto a cd, then onto the EHD. I also do Dailys and weeklys on the EHD which get overriden each time.

I personally cannot stand tapes. They are slow and can cause o lot of greif.

[Gijs]

isn't there another option, like online storage, for example www.streamload.com? The only limitations there are download capacity (the largest account is 60GB/month) but the storage is said to be unlimited.

[Giovanni]

Considering that in less than 5 years those projects will probably be meaningless, you only need a media that holds them for that long.

And since you want to backup as quickly as possible, I would get a couple of the cheapest external USB2 (or firewire) Hard disk, reformat NTFS, and shove the project folders on there.

You can retrive files quickly, plug and play, browse with Win Explorer, just like any other working folder.

Oh, and the drives are most of the time stackable....



regards

gio

[muzzy]

I bet you can get better prices and different systems but something like this is more practical

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10647

[rpc212]

Nice idea with LaCie drive but I wouldn't buy LaCie under any circumstances!

I bought one of their Electron Blue 19 monitors and I had to send it in for servicing. It took LaCie 1 year and 5 different monitors before I received one that was in working order. In addition it has two black spots on it and LaCie refuses to do anything about it saying they sent me 5 monitors and I am just being fussy! Their manager here in Canada just gave me the brush off and said, "To bad we can't satisfy you and when the monitor left our depot it was working perfectly!" So I am stuck with a monitor that has two black dots on it clearly visible to anyone except the LaCie people!

LaCie is not a good company as they just will not backup their products as they have proved with my case!

[tricky]

I would get a couple of the cheapest external USB2 (or firewire) Hard disk, reformat NTFS,

Why NTFS over FAT32?

[alkis]

i concur about lacie as i had two external 250gb firewires fail within a week from their purchase. not good
not good at all

[mike.edel]

i suggest to stay away from dat
its hopelessly outdated (slow, and because of the way the recorded data is stored - diagonal tracks of data on magnetic tape - its very fragile)

dlt seems to be a better alternative
recently read a reviw of a tandberg dlt-v4 drive
native capacity 160GB (5x the space of current dat drives)
is supposed to be sold for around 900€, one tape goes for 40€
the recording format is horizontally, which is more robust (wich dat never had to be, coming from the audio recording realm)

btw: only has sata or scsi interface (no external drives as far as i know)
sure its slower than disks and you still have to search for files on backup


another way would be mirrored raid disks (should be raid1 if i remember correctly) - that at least would keep you safe if one disk fails (not tooo seldom and it always happens when you dont expect it)
the major disadvantage is storage of those backup disks
if you have a fire in your server room (or whereever the disks are stored) your backup is gone

the tapes can be easily carried around/home/to the safe without risking any damage

cu mike

ps: ntfs is more robust than fat32 (+ it has less wasted space with small files since the cluster size doesnt scale with the disk size)

[muzzy]

i concur about lacie as i had two external 250gb firewires fail within a week from their purchase. not good
not good at all

Dell, and other companies has similiar solutions, you don't have to go with La Clie, but it is an easy and fast solution.