How would you backup 500GB?

[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

[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! [img]../forum/images/smilies/biggrin.png[/img]

[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.