desmondg
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Tape Backup vs Removable hard drive backup
A suggestion is being made to me regarding changing our backup system from backing up to tapes to backing up to removable hard drives. What are the pros and cons of this approach?
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dovidmichel
What is more popular is to backup to disk and then move that to tape.
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MarkDozier,
I am doing practically the same thing you are presently.
ALL,
Problem is the tape drive I use is reaching its capacity in terms of the amount of data it can back up on one tape and we don't want to have to attend to the backup other than changing tapes in the morning.
Tamanti,
you say 'I just made a few script to manage everything, deleting old backups, copying new.' Do you keep a log of what happens in your backup? Do you use a scheduler to initiate the backup? What about SQL Server databases that need the server process to be shut down before the datafiles can be copied?
Do any of you know of some commercial product that manages backup to hard drives?
And thanks to all for the ccomments. No doubt the points will have to be split!
I am doing practically the same thing you are presently.
ALL,
Problem is the tape drive I use is reaching its capacity in terms of the amount of data it can back up on one tape and we don't want to have to attend to the backup other than changing tapes in the morning.
Tamanti,
you say 'I just made a few script to manage everything, deleting old backups, copying new.' Do you keep a log of what happens in your backup? Do you use a scheduler to initiate the backup? What about SQL Server databases that need the server process to be shut down before the datafiles can be copied?
Do any of you know of some commercial product that manages backup to hard drives?
And thanks to all for the ccomments. No doubt the points will have to be split!
> Do you keep a log of what happens in your backup?
> Do you use a scheduler to initiate the backup?
First of all, I do the backup in two steps.
In the night I compress the data to backup to a local hard-disk. This is a slow process. A lot of data have to be compressed. I use gzip or bzip2 to get better compression (slower).
In the morning I connect the LaCie to my desktop and rsync all the data.
I'm on Unix-like OSs (Linux, Solaris, MacOSX). Now I don't have any Windows machine to backup, but when I had I used samba to mount the partition on linux and I did the backup from there.
On Unix systems you can easy schedule the backup with cron and crontab.
I've never used the scheduler on MS Windows, but I know there's one. If not, surly it's not difficult to develop it or find one program on internet.
I used to keep logs of my backup when using tapes. I don't feel the urge to keep logs now. It's all well ordered, in well named directory. Vesy easy to find and always there.
It's useful to have a local copy. Sometimes I don't have any LaCie with me (es: in the afternoon), but I can recover lost files anyway.
> What about SQL Server databases that need the server process to be shut down before the datafiles can be copied?
We use Oracle and hot backup (backup while running). If you have to shutdown your database, you need to synchronize all very well.
Otherway your backup scripts have to shutdown database from remote or stay on the same machine.
If you have to keep short downtime you can make a copy of all the data and then compress the copied data. The downtime is necessary only for the copy that is usually faster then the compress process.
I use one Linux server to manage all the backup. Scripts start from there and use ssh to perform commands on other servers (stop tasks, compress, ...) and scp to transfer backups.
ASKER
Thanks to all who contributed. I will stick to using a tape drive since, although we have the skills in-house to write the scripts to manage the backup to removable disk, we don't have the luxury of time to fully test it. I prefer to play it safe where the backups are concerned and so without proper testing of the backup scripts I will stick to the time-tested practice of using tapes. Thanks again.