[Wylug-help] Tape drive advice

[James Holden]

Gary Stainburn wrote:

>Hi folks
>
>I'm looking to install a 80GB HDD and a tape drive into one of my linux
>boxes to create a network backup server. The tape drive should have at
>least 40GB capacity.
>
>I've been looking at the stuff available from CCL  -
>http://www.cclonline.com/product-categories.asp?category_id=148 - and
>wondered what people's opinions of the various devices are.
>
>
Gary,

As you'll have noticed, serious tape drives are:

1) SCSI
2) Expensive

...so I'm assuming this is for work, right?

There are various holy wars still raging of DDS vs DLT vs Whatever, but
it doesn't really matter what you choose. I have no experience of
IDE/USB/Whatever drives, only SCSI.

Don't rely on the compression doing what is says it will do. It works
for MS Office files and sometimes executables, but many things are
already compressed, eg: gif/jpeg files, OpenOffice.org documents. The
2:1 compression is a maximum. You might not get any compression at all.

SCSI tape drives have a fairly standard software interface. Linux
supports this reasonably well.

Make sure any SCSI card you buy is suppored.

You'll also need to budget for enough media to do a proper rotation
schedule, which might typically consist of 20 tapes, eg: (M, Tu, Th, F,
W1, W2, W3 W4, J, F, M, A M, J, J, A, S, O, N, D). Tapes can be
expensive, so this could add another 300 quid onto the bill.

Don't forget the cleaning tape.

Store the tapes somewhere sensible - cool, dry, vertical, away from
monitors and other sources of EMI. Preferably offsite. Don't put too
much trust in a fire safe.

The statistics indicate that something like 70% of businesses that
suffer major data loss go bust in less than six months (can't remember
the actual statistics, but in the right ballpark).

Don't forget to do test restores on a regular basis, to make sure your
backup strategy is working as you expect.

Also, you'll need to train somebody how to change the tapes in case
you're off sick or on holiday.

Tape backup is slow. Make sure you schedule the backups so they happen
out of hours and finish before work starts the next morning.

There are alternatives, of course. Investigate whether Rsync over SSH
and a hosted server might be a good choice.

Personally (at home) I use DDS3 for disaster recovery (eg:
OS/application recovery) and a cron job that does Rsync over ssh to my
colo box for user data and transient stuff, eg: mail spools.

There is a variety of free/expensive backup software products. Amanda is
a good place to start (www.amanda.org).

James

>--
>Gary Stainburn
>
>This email does not contain private or confidential material as it
>may be snooped on by interested government parties for unknown
>and undisclosed purposes - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wylug-help mailing list
>Wylug-help at wylug.org.uk
>http://list.wylug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/wylug-help
>
>