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what sort of capacity can tape backup handle?

I'm setting up a cluster thats going to have two nodes each sharing two external DAS HDD enclosures with combined storage of 6 TB. I'm wondering - can tape handle that sort of volume of data?

if i want to do a tape backup each night - can I? If tape can handle that much data - do all tape setups handle that much data? How long does it take to dump that much data to tape?

Do i have to take my system down to dump to tape?

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Lee W, MVP

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Cyber-Dude

leew suggests a good offer here but, I would consider an external storage provider to create an DRP site. This is due to the reason you are using a large data capacity and I think that this is an important issue at your company (i.e. keep data structure).

Links:
About Disaster Recovery Plan:
http://www.comp-soln.com/DRP2_whitepaper.pdf

Cyber

Duncan Meyers

Soon to be relased LTO3 tapes are 400GB native, 800GB compressed. Worth waiting.

Lee W, MVP

Not worth waiting if you have a problem next week and no backup because you were waiting. In addition, SDLT drives can generally read older DLT and SDLT tapes. BUT if you don't have any of those, this is irrelevent.

Wait if you absolutely can wait. But otherwise... It's also worth comparing media costs and numbers needed. And I STRONGLY recommend against going with the hype - in other words, IGNORE references to compressed capacities. If you're backing up MPEG files and ZIP files, you're compression is going to awful. If you're compressing database files, then you might see EVEN BETTER than 2:1 compression. Go with RAW uncompressed formats in your analysis - or at least be VERY conservative in your expected compression - 1.1:1 or 1.25:1 if the files backed up are a wide variety.

Duncan Meyers

OK.

Worth waiting for if you can.