We currently do our backups online with Tivoli software with one of these online offsite backup companies.
It costs us an absolute fortune and although it has been useful in the past i am wondering if the costs weigh up against the benefits compared to tape.
The problems i can see with it are:
1. When backing up the exchange and SQL DBs it backs up the large databases as 1 file and in the case of a system restore it will take a few days to download GB's of DB's.
2. It is killing the bandwidth of our Leased line connection.
3. It is very expensive
I am considering going back to tape storage to improve the speed of backups (Local instead of remote) and improve the restore time of these huge DB's.
Obviously i am aware of the extra admin of taking the disks off site etc, but it the hassle worth putting up with if you are saving alot of money (A similar amount to a good wage)
I am sure alot of companies have migrated away from tapes to online backup, but has anyone ever gone the other way?
How much data are we talking about? Ever consider duplicate media sets running a job to disk then to tape. (Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape) During the week all databases ran to disk media then we would duplicate those media sets to tape over the weekend. This gave us the ability to restore quickly from local disk media while still archiving tape media (to my house about 10 mins away just to get it offsite) just a thought... Our backups were ~3TB nightly and ~6TB Fulls on the weekend.
Hello, what about doing LAN Free? I recently finish a project implementing TDP MSSQL 1Full x week the rest differential retentions 35 days. Offsite was done with two librairies "syncronized" bay a backup stg script. To slow down the backup time, I have proposet to keep the nichtly backup on SCSI disk then after 08:00 strting to migrate TO SATA disk (less expensive) THEN, on tape with relax and NO time pressure.
