Rev drive and domain controller

Well... Arcserve and REV drives do go very well together... especially since they bundle them.

But for your use, it doesn't make sense to me if you're going to back up 200GB regularly.  Because you'd need a Rev Auto-loader as well since the drives are only 35GB.

Have you considered backing up to external Hard Drives instead?

Also, when you say that you think tape drive recovery will be slow... what is "slow"?  How fast do you need recovery to go and what other disaster recovery plans do you have in place?

Jeff
TechSoEasy

I was told by the people at veritas to use tape drives for archival purpose and external hard drives for the daily backup in a drive array so they can be revoered when needed a if its say a file from 2 months ago we pull out a tape. they said most companies are using disk to disk to tape as a backup method. right now we are using windows 2003 backup and an  external tape to backup our server with task manager

So, I'm not sure what your question is then...

Jeff
TechSoEasy

Am I correct my boss is totally against the method I want to use he wants to use the tape drive spanning with rev drive instead of buying a new tape drive that can support 200 gigs and domain restore. I am just checking myself becuase he is adiment about his proposed method I think its all about saving money

Well you stated that he is worried about a tape drive restore being too slow.  Yet you are ignoring that aspect when looking to validate your own solution.

Saving money may very well be one issue... so you should actually create a table with all of the variables for each option:  Tape, REV, Hard Drive

Then, assess the variables:  Cost, Speed, Reliability, etc.

Jeff
TechSoEasy

not sure what you mean..

He will not admit it is money and I have to ry and prove the best way to back up

my initial question was having to do with Rev drive quick yes but can spanning be a good alternative when doing daily backups.

How difficult is this backup he stated we can span the inital backup than use one disk for differential changes daily in other word the first backup will use three or more disk after that we will just need to put one disk in and it will only backup the changes. In companies I have worked for we have always backed up using high capacity media with on tape per day

Well, I was trying to give you a piece of advice about how to properly present the owner with the options available to him.  It will also give you the opportunity to actually evaluate whether or not using the REV drive is a good idea.  There is no way for me or anyone on this site for that matter to know what will work best for you.  Plenty of companies are using the REV drive for backups... some like them and some don't.  

Your supposition that your boss "won't admit" that it's about money is being blind to the fact that pretty much all business decisions are about money.

The actual cost of the drive, though, is a small part of the "money" decision, and if you don't properly evaluate the true costs... including estimates of reliability, ease-of-use, restore time, etc.

So... if I told you that his recommendation is valid... in that Arcstore certainly does work just fine for a full restore with REV drives, would you know whether or not it was BETTER than tape drives?  And as for tape drives... are you looking at DLT or LTO?  And why aren't you considering USB Hard drives in rotation (which is what I happen to use for most all of my clients).

Jeff
TechSoEasy

I am considering the USB Hard drive but for the ease of keeping a history of at least 1 year

2 yearly backup - 12 monthly backups - 4 weekly and 7 daily backups

not sure if this is realistic but I have been requested 2 years back and we do not have this with the present backup

I want tape or rev to be taken offsite and stored whiles the hard drives would be used for the daily backups

I could acctually go back 14 days with the hard drives if I use a large capacity disk

I probably would use DLT due to the fact LTO is extreamly expensive

I guess I should have reworded my question though I am trying to find out with REV drives

can I realisticly take and spann the 200 gigs than everday put one disk in and backup the changes of the 200 gigs and be able to restore in case of a catostophic failure.

BTW The company is also a multi million dollar company that for some reason feels that they should cut cost @ IT have almost 100 users at one site using the Box the is a domain controller, file server, print server, DHCP, DNS, RDP for terminal service use of a database application, & a few other uses I can not rememeber it has crashed 3 times in the last 6 months and that is why I am so concerned becuase he does not want to buy anymore servers I won't get into that but I think if it crashes and does not want to come back up I would like to be able to restore easily and am not sure about this rev drive spanning theory

Thanks allot I realized that we would need an auto loader and this could be pretty expensive when buying the disk for backups if he would want to using them for daily backups as you would a regular tape drive I am going to go with the disk to tape recommendation if you have to recover from tape for something a few months back they should be offsite anyways so should take a day to get back if its a complete disaster we would have totake time to rebuild the server anyways. I am going to recommend a failover server int this instance using doubletake