How would you backup 500GB?

[beyond-tec]

Looks like we got some tech freaks in here :-)

I'd like to backup 500 GB daily and the backup needs to be carried out of the company (in case of fire)
so I'm looking for a backup solution which can backup 500 GB and ain't that heavy / big.

shouldn't cost more than 1500 EUR.

things that won't work:
- external harddisks
- NAS Stations

so, any ideas how to backup ?


thx in advance

[Majestic_Clown]

something like this?

750 gig USB drive

http://www.cdiscount.com/informatique/disques-durs/memup-koogar-750-go/f-107360203-KOOGAR750GO.html?search=750go&trilist=0&numpage=1

French website btw :P

[elo]

LTO-4 is 800GB/1600GB uncompressed/compressed

BUT... the drives alone run $5k US (not sure how that compares to Euro)

past that the tapes are ~$90 US and you can reuse for some period of time.

[gylu]

Is this for a company or for home? mixed data or all one type (ie all data base)? you may want to look for something in the way of tape backup but a fast google search did not get much. I know there are company's that do it as the company that I work for has everything backed up nightly on them I just don't know he is doing it for them. This Link ('http://www.datadepositbox.com/ads/online-backup.asp?promoid=1&source=google&vcn=online+backup&gclid=CJitvMXjgpICFQgdPAod_BTY-w') my have what you are looking for.

[Djarid]

How much does the data change on a daily basis?

a differential copy might be your best strategy... do you need it archived in a snapshot? (i.e. able to return all data to a checkpoint in time)

Attix5 is able to do both of these... not sure on providers in Germany but I am sure they must have a representative there.
This is available in both hosted and installed flavours... The smallest licenced protected data is 500Gb. They licence on amount of data to be protected not he space it takes up in the archive system

We were protecting 2Tb, remotely backing up offices all over Europe. For a sales office in Italy we were protecting 200Gb with a daily delta of around 30Gb but transferring < 20Mb over the network (many of the files were PSTs and we used block level differential)

[Wilbur]

Tape backups FTW.

If you are in the UK, I could recommend a couple of secure off-site Data protectors.

Check out http://www.ironmountain.co.uk

These are the type of people/organisations you should be looking at for off-site data storage.

[Djarid]

Tape backups FTW.

If you are in the UK, I could recommend a couple of secure off-site Data protectors.

Check out http://www.ironmountain.co.uk

These are the type of people/organisations you should be looking at for off-site data storage.I don't know about tapes FTW! but if you do go for a tape backup solution (LTO 3 @ 2k€ + 50€ per tape) Compressed you might fit all that data on 2 tapes. if you are taking a daily diff and a weekly full then you are looking at maybe 7 tapes a week (assuming backed up differential data grows linearly) that could be an expensive solution and someone would have to change tapes at 0300! ;) With a decent tape rotation strategy you are looking at 50+ tapes with periodic pairs used only once.

Yup we used to use Iron mountain for Datacentre backups

[beyond-tec]

@clown: looks like a harddisk? don't wanna use harddisks

@elo: 5K doesn't fit in the budget :-)

@gylu: as mentioned in the mainthread it's for a company.
I can't use online backups because we only got 10kb/sec upstream
so a backup of 500 GB would take until next year *g*

@Djarid: lots of datas change. I want a complete backup to aware
that a tape between the initial tape and the last tape is broken.
So I'm going to safe 500 GB each day.

@Wilbur: I love tapes but only found 320GB (compressed) tapes or
the Sony 500GB thingy which costs more than 5K € :(
Can't upload the data because of the upstream mentioned above


thx for all the replys so far

[Wilbur]

Upload?

They send a nice man in a van to pick the tapes up from you every day :-D

[beyond-tec]

coooool stuff.
he travels each day from the UK to Germany just to pick up our tape?

*ggg*

[zanthor]

What you are suggesting and the budget you have listed you will not find a viable solution.

If you can raise your budget slightly to support an LTO3 drive and tapes that will handle it quite nicely, the problem you'll run into is if someone isn't there to swap tapes your backups will be delayed. An LTO4 drive will hold significantly more but cost significantly more as well...

[Schwarz]

http://www.drobo.com/

Data Robots ftw. I convinced my company to buy one of these and we haven't had a problem so far.

[sventek]

We have had a similar requirement at a few locations. For those customers that must have a cheap backup solution and a hard drive wont work for various reasons we have put in Iomega REV drives and had pretty good luck with them. They come in an autoloader (no swapping tapes at 2am, horray!) and cartridges are pretty inexpensive. Not sure the price in EUR though as I am in the US.

Also you did not mention OS, but we have these running on Windows machines as well as Linux (via BackupEDGE) and I believe an old AIX box as well.

Edit: link (http://www.iomega.com/direct/products/detail.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=41523475&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=27324929&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=63191&bmUID=1205174546756)

[kllrwlf]

Not sure the price in EUR though as I am in the US.

The US Dollar is pretty weak. ~$1500 == 1000 Euro

Iomega Rev looks pretty cool!

[Sarduci]

Sounds like you almost want near/real time protection and a SAN at another location to prevent tape issues. Check out something like Double Take to do that and all you'll need is a cheap SATA DAS/NAS/SAN solution at the far end. We use SATA SANs in production environments for near-line and disk to disk to tape without any issues. They grind away in RAID50 or RAID55 configs without much worry. The last one needed somewhere around 8 or 10 drive failures before having a logical drive fail.

Otherwise, we use LTO3 or LTO4 multihead tape libraries with 60+ slots (NEO Overland series) to support 8+ TB MSSQL database (that size compressed) and the associated files (usually as much or more data not compressible) running in a RAID0 configuration. I've use the CA and Symantec solutions for more than a few years now and they've come a long way with supporting large data sets and complex rotations.

None of these will fit your budget, the tapes alone from and properly spec'd tape system would blow threw that. Looks like some kind of encrypted hard disk solution is what I'd recommend.

Edit: Got interrupted mid thought, forgot to finish a sentence! ../forum/images/smilies/biggrin.png

[zanthor]

Drobo seems to be a NAS storage device thats fairly flexible and low cost, it wouldn't be viable for offsite storage and rotating backups offsite daily.

Moving the drives in and out of the device would be sure death to the drives in relatively short order (We spent 2 years working with Disk to Disk to Disk backup systems before finally moving to Disk to Disk to Tape for reliable offsites. (We had a 75% failure rate in recovery in our test cases that the drives would fail in the long run.)

I'm currently running centralized backups for our corporate headquarters off a single LTO3 drive which is backing up an average of 2 tapes weekly with a 2nd LTO3 library at our datacenter doing the same. In the three years I've been running these solutions (2 years running Disk to Disk to Disk) I have had 90% fewer problems with D2D2T than I did D2D2D...

That said, you can cost justify the extra expense to the suits that matter by pointing out higher reliability (I'd find whitepapers on this, should be available from any vendor who sells this crap) and the total cost of having the data backed up vs having to send in drives for repair/recovery with a system like OnTrack and the downtime involved in said solution.

[sigtau66]

It's amazing when a company sets a VERY low limit on a backup solution. If I was in your situation with such a low ball figure the first thing I'd do is ask the people in charge how much their data is worth if it was all lost. Once they put a dollar amount on that then you can sit down and come up with a viable solution to protect the "valuable" data. Putting a low ball figure like 1500 euros on 500gb of data is just ridiculous.

But yeah, I'd say there is going to be no viable solution for that low of a price.

[zanthor]

Secondary HDD with a pull out drive bay (you'd need two of them, to swap daily). (or E-SATA)

External USB and that amount of data will make baby jesus cry because it takes too f'ing long over USB 2.0.This is BEGGING for data loss. I've got an external case and 10 removable trays/hdd's. They simply don't stand up well to traveling on a daily basis.

[Djarid]

Your budget is the real problem here... as you can see there are many solutions, some robust, others less.

As I think Zanthor said get a € figure per Gb protected and that will indicate a realistic budget. Remember that cheaper solutions often have hidden extra charges Tape drive solutions often have 30% support costs not to mention the consumable costs. Hard drive solutions often have an inherent data integrity issues and so resilience has to be built into the process not the hardware.

perhaps the simplest and most cost effective solution within your budget may be for you to create a light, small form factor PC with RAID 1 hard drives and rely on multiple copies of the data.

[sventek]

Wouldnt it be nice if you could just go to the client and say, that isnt spending enough money because of x reason, y reason and z reason. And tell them that they need to spend more. Yeah, if this is a small enough customer they will tell you to get bent and find someone that will find a solution in their budget. Yes, buying a decent LTO/DAT/etc would be ideal, real world consulting for small businesses though this just doesnt happen.

And yes, I have heard every argument why you should "make" them spend more. And why its a disservice to them to do anything less. But real world, people are cheap, ESPECIALLY when it comes to their data, until it is lost. About all you can do is make your recommendations of the right way, and the way that fits into their budget making sure they know this is not the best way of doing it.

Posting this since people dont seem to be answering his question under the given parameters but answering his question with a different set of them. But yeah, try the REV drive (autoloader), they arent horrible and they fit the price range.

[kllrwlf]

I work at a warehouse industrial location. For my business, I decided to spend $4000 to up the security for my warehouse because there was an incident at a neighboring warehouse being broken into and a computer was stolen.

My computer is worth about $2000. The cost to replace a panel of glass is about $1500. The data with all the customer's information, order information, inventory databases is worth some crazy number that I can't imagine, well exceeding $4000.

Some of my neighbors went cheap... and 2 break-ins later, I know that I made the right choice.

I would give the client some recommendations. One with the price range that they would like, one that's a little higher, and one that's higher that the previous. Tell them the pro/con on all 3, let them make their choice. At least they were informed. :thumbsup:

[beyond-tec]

It's amazing when a company sets a VERY low limit on a backup solution.

We got three servers here which costs about 2500 € (all of them together).
So I got problems argumenting that we shall spent 5000 € for a backup solution =)

I think I'll split the data in several groups and will backup each group twice a week.
So I can use a Quantum 160/320 GB drive which will cost about 1,2K € with 5 tapes.

We got a Raid-Mirror to prevent data loss because of Harddisk Crash and we even got
an external backup harddisk. Only reason why I want another backup solution is if
someone steals the PC or we got a fire in here.

[thinus]

1) Write a trojan / keylogger that you distribute via a fake "How to make millions of gold in WoW for FREE!!!!" websites. Just give them some basic mining/herbalism and dailies crap to fool the gullible, ie 50%+ of the WoW population.

2) Use your new remote zombie army to store all your data via the trojan.

3) Sell off the accounts and gold of 10% of your most unreliable zombies to pay for your new bandwidth requirements.

4) ?????

5) Profit.

[beyond-tec]

8| ?(

[Zoroaster]

Basically you have 2 choices since uploading the files is not an option.

1 - Some type of tape backup system, I work with tape silos every day, and while they cost a bit for the initial setup, buying new tapes is relatively cheap for the amount of data storage you get, making it well worth it in the end.

2 - Backup to hard disks which are then taken off-site daily.

If you want to have a series of backups really your only choice is to use tapes, having multiple sets of HDD's will add up quickly. However, if you are willing to overwrite your data each day then a couple HDD's is probably your best choice.

Iron Mountain, in the US, is a very good data storage company. I've never had any issues with tapes getting lost or anything, and I send off/receive close to 1000 tapes per week. Sounds like you are dealing with smaller scale then this, so just taking the backups home with you each night should be fine. Maybe invest in a small fire-proof safe for your house to store them in.

Also, yell at your bosses about giving you a tiny budget, 1500 Euros is nothing for how much time/money will be invested into restoring the data if it's lost/corrupted.

[Sarduci]

Welcome to the Slashdot crowd.......
1) Write a trojan / keylogger that you distribute via a fake "How to make millions of gold in WoW for FREE!!!!" websites. Just give them some basic mining/herbalism and dailies crap to fool the gullible, ie 50%+ of the WoW population.

2) Use your new remote zombie army to store all your data via the trojan.

3) Sell off the accounts and gold of 10% of your most unreliable zombies to pay for your new bandwidth requirements.

4) ?????

5) Profit.

[Ozbert]

Floppy disks.

[beyond-tec]

Floppy disks.
sometimes I wish someone would develop a "punch-in-the-face" button which works through the internet :D :D :D :D

[zanthor]

Even if you put it in something like a nice, padded, water-tight, air-tight pelican case? I hadn't considered this.

But laptop HDDs / Ipods mini-HDDS get constant daily traveling... ?(Laptop HDDs, Ipod's, etc are all designed for travel and suspended in particularly resilient cases with the idea of being beat to shit... Laptop hard drives top out at 320GB for around $160US... their performance is slower than their desktop counterparts due to the design being shoved into a smaller box, etc... potentially viable to run with the smaller drives but you are talking several of them for each days backup.

We got three servers here which costs about 2500 € (all of them together).
So I got problems argumenting that we shall spent 5000 € for a backup solution =)

I think I'll split the data in several groups and will backup each group twice a week.
So I can use a Quantum 160/320 GB drive which will cost about 1,2K € with 5 tapes.

We got a Raid-Mirror to prevent data loss because of Harddisk Crash and we even got
an external backup harddisk. Only reason why I want another backup solution is if
someone steals the PC or we got a fire in here.This is well outside your original spec of:
I'd like to backup 500 GB daily and the backup needs to be carried out of the company (in case of fire)
so I'm looking for a backup solution which can backup 500 GB and ain't that heavy / big.It sounds like you have your need, one thing I'd caution you of is to ensure you analyze the cost of lost data since the last offsite backup before you commit to your client or your supervisor a proposal that is going to cost them thousands. I know we are talking different scales here... The company I work for does backups nightly of our database servers with 4 hour incremental translog dumps because losing more than half a days work would cost us that much...

If the budget is the issue, write up what it would cost to do it "right", and write up what it would cost to do it within their budget. Document the risks of doing it on a budget and let the customer or supervisor make the call... that way if it does blow up down the road, it's not on your shoulders.

As an aside, when I was working in the retail world I had a customer who called me up with a dead scsi drive on his server, the server was 7 years old and wasn't built with a RAID... he said no biggie as he had a backup from the previous night. Once I arrived on site, I was stunned as not only did he have last nights backup, but he had a well labeled mobile box of tapes that he said he took home each night, he had 14 tapes that he rotated through religiously... Two 7 day cycles of one full backup and 6 incremental backups...

So I toss the drive in the system, install the base OS and start the restore... once the restore finishes I notice something odd... all the file dates are 7 years old... I check the backups and I see snapshots for 3 weeks on each full backup set, but they are all 7 years old... I dump the backup config from the backup, and check...

Sure enough the technician that set them up 7 years ago (thank god this wasn't me) had set the backup job to append to the tapes instead of overwrite... and had turned off error reporting. So for 7 years, my customer had rotated tapes in and out of the system only to have the system throw a media full error and end the job. Since the tech had never trained the end user to check the logs, we had a worthless backup...

Three days later OnTrack Data Recovery had a full dump of his drive for us, only cost the customer $2,500 for that...

[Majestic_Clown]

Floppy disks.
sometimes I wish someone would develop a "punch-in-the-face" button which works through the internet :D :D :D :Dthat would work if you had 355556 floppy disks :P

[thinus]

What is the nature of the data? 500GB a day changing... Can't it be compressed to a more manageable size?