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I am looking for a solution for moving around 3TB offsite? any ideas? Tapes take too long to backup, and offsite solutions would cost in the range of around 1000$ per month. Are hardrives a solution? Any idea's even ones I have shot down would be appreciated. Thank you.

" full situation "

Full situation, We currently have 7 servers creating around 3TB. We would like to have weekly backups but if the place went up in flames we would have around 1 week or so to get back up on our feet. We need around 1 month to go back 2 would be nice. Currently we are able to do backups of every server nightly except one which is our File Server generating 1.9TB alone, which we backup once a week on weekends. We want to have all our data offsite in case of a disaster. Recovery shouldn't take more than the 1 week period of time.

We dont need to move offsite daily. We have daily backups to a Server We have an issue moving offsite.

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6 Answers 6

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For the best answers, you should fully describe the situation you're in and what a solution needs to accomplish.

Are you moving 3 TB offsite a month (a week, a day) or just one time? How fast do you need access to it, presumably for restores? Why do you need it off-site, and how are you getting it there? Imagine you're putting it in your car to take to your house for storage. The car or the house are robbed. The media contains social security numbers of your clients. You company is now in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNN's main page.

Without this info, I am assuming you need safe off-site duplicates of your weekly backups. If you can't get a full backup once a week, look into multiplexing to more than one drive, or backup software or storage deduplication so that you can do synthetic fulls and clone those to tape, for storage off-site with a reputable vendor. Disclaimer - I work for Iron Mountain, but not in the divisions that stores tapes or does online backup software.

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  • Full situation, We currently have 7 servers creating around 3TB. We would like to have weekly backups but if the place went up in flames we would have around 1 week or so to get back up on our feet. We need around 1 month to go back 2 would be nice. Currently we are able to do backups of every server nightly except one which is our File Server generating 1.9TB alone, which we backup once a week on weekends. We want to have all our data offsite in case of a disaster. Recovery shouldn't take more than the 1 week period of time.
    – Kevin
    Apr 7, 2010 at 17:40
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You could categorize your data according to importance and work with the business to create an appropriate SLA. Typical things to focus on are time to restore and how stale the data gets. Weight is given between full and incremental, typically weekly and daily accordingly. If your backup SLA is developed properly, the technical options should be obvious.

LTO-4 can store 800GB. While not always ideal, plenty of people use tape. You are going to find you encounter logistical issues regardless. Often, compromises are made between importance of the data and cost. The more data, the more cost.

Hard drives can be appropriate but due to them being mechanical I wouldn't recommend using them for rotation. For off-site storage, the primary choices are between copying over a network to a physically separate location or a portable medium that's less prone to failure. (Tape)

Edit

We dont need to move offsite daily. We have daily backups to a Server We have an issue moving offsite.

So write incremental backups daily to tape too. I don't really understand your issue at this point. Full backups with large data sets are not going to be instantaneous.

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If you want to move things over the Internet in an encrypted fashion, why not use rsync and synchronize to another server? This way you wouldn't need to take full backups all the time and just sync up data, even daily.

I'm not sure where you're getting 1000$ per month for 3TB of storage, but it costs 360$ per month for 3TB of space over at http://royalbackup.com, though you will have to use free tools as they don't have any branded software to use.

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How fast does it need to be done? You said tapes take to long, LT04 you can in theory get 140 MB/s I believe, so that is about 6 hours, and another drive and 3 hours:

echo $(( 3000000.0/140.0/60.0/60.0 ))
5.9523809523809517

This is of course the theoretical speeds ... I've always had all evening to do my backups :-)

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  • Our Tapedrive is an LTO3 drive, and its a garbage drive.
    – Kevin
    Apr 7, 2010 at 17:34
  • I've had pretty good luck with Dell's PowerVault libraries.
    – Warner
    Apr 7, 2010 at 17:38
  • Ya, I I've 2xHP Ultrium LTO3 in a Sun library which worked fine for years. The little guide on the front of one of them just broke, and I have had to fix it with duct tape until we get a new service contract :-P Terrifying, but it is working so far... Apr 7, 2010 at 17:42
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    Check you're feeding your existing tape drive with data fast enough before condemning it as a garbage drive. With a good enough data source it'll be at least as fast as an external HD, with lower cost and no chance of a drive failing to spin up.
    – xenny
    Apr 7, 2010 at 19:10
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We use small (4 disk) firewire JBOD enclosures.

The thing to remember is that you pack up all of the cables for storage, as there was once when we brought one back so we could re-image it, and it had used three little short firewire cables (so it was really just 4 disks chained together), and we had to go scrounging for replacement cables to make use of it -- in a disaster recovery situation, that would've sucked.

We only run them every couple of weeks, though ... tapes would be easier if you were trying to do this daily.

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  • We dont need to move offsite daily. We have daily backups to a Server We have an issue moving offsite.
    – Kevin
    Apr 7, 2010 at 17:45
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Do offsite backup-to-disk with de-duplication (incremental forever) for disaster recovery. Use tape backup for archiving/long time storage.

Backup Exec 2010 with de-duplication option is a good example.

(I don't have anything more useful to say about this, it's that simple.)