Backing up to external HD rather than tape

[Neil Brierley]

Hi,

Our Sony tape drive/auto-loader broke again the other day, so I am looking
at alternate backup solutions. I really like the idea of using an external
USB2/Firewire hard disk instead of tape, but couldn't find any good
articles, comments or warnings on the web or in the newsgroups.

We currently use Backup Exec 9 to backup 3 Windows 2000 servers, with Open
File Option's and Exchange agent as neccessary. BE supports backup-to-disk
on removable media, so that should be fine, so now it just comes down to
finding the right 'media'. I've been looking at the Maxtor one-touch
80-300GB units (80GB is currently the max we backup, but this is going to
half when I do some restructuring), and would intend to purchase several of
these and swap them out on say a weekly basis. Does anyone have any
experience of these drives or similar? I don't want to use the one-touch
backup feature, I just want fast, external, hot-pluggable NTFS storage that
can easily be taken offsite and will work reliably on 2K server with Backup
Exec.

Any comments or suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

TIA,
Neil.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi,

Our Sony tape drive/auto-loader broke again the other day, so I am looking
at alternate backup solutions. I really like the idea of using an external
USB2/Firewire hard disk instead of tape, but couldn't find any good
articles, comments or warnings on the web or in the newsgroups.

Some general observation: Since you need >= 3 backup sets for reliable
backups, you need at least 3 of these external HDDs. Apart from that
they just work like HDDs unless you pull the plug wuthout telling
the OS first. I made good experiences with enclosures from Agrosy
used with Firewire. I had problems with several different USB2
solutions, including the Agrosy. But that may have been problems
with my mainboards (VIA VT600 chipset under Linux).

[MS backup software questins snipped, since I have no experience
with doing Backups under Windows.]

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

Hi,

Our Sony tape drive/auto-loader broke again the other day, so I am looking
at alternate backup solutions. I really like the idea of using an external
USB2/Firewire hard disk instead of tape, but couldn't find any good
articles, comments or warnings on the web or in the newsgroups.

We currently use Backup Exec 9 to backup 3 Windows 2000 servers, with Open
File Option's and Exchange agent as neccessary. BE supports backup-to-disk
on removable media, so that should be fine, so now it just comes down to
finding the right 'media'. I've been looking at the Maxtor one-touch
80-300GB units (80GB is currently the max we backup, but this is going to
half when I do some restructuring), and would intend to purchase several of
these and swap them out on say a weekly basis. Does anyone have any
experience of these drives or similar? I don't want to use the one-touch
backup feature, I just want fast, external, hot-pluggable NTFS storage that
can easily be taken offsite and will work reliably on 2K server with Backup
Exec.

Any comments or suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

Works fine and plenty are doing it that way now.

 

[CWatters]

Hi,

Our Sony tape drive/auto-loader broke again the other day, so I am looking
at alternate backup solutions. I really like the idea of using an external
USB2/Firewire hard disk instead of tape, but couldn't find any good
articles, comments or warnings on the web or in the newsgroups.

I'm doing this now using PowerQuest Drive Image on my home network. I
schedule DI to do nightly full image backups and keep as many backup sets as
will fit on the drive (in my case 7 x 13Gbyte images). DI automatically
deletes the oldest image after the latest one verifies. I ave it send me a
status report by email. I also set up DI to split each 13GByte image into
600MByte chunks. Every once in a while I copy a set to DVD but if I really
had to I could put an image onto a set of 22 CD's.

I had some problems when I tried to share the drive so I could backup to it
from another PC over the network. I had two problems: a) access permission
and other strange errors - which turned out to be caused by Norton Anti
virus messing with irpstacksize in the registry and b) "Delayed Write
Failure" which appeared to be caused by excess network traffic due to the
use of shared folders (More info on request).

Main advice for more serious set up would be to use several drives and keep
them all as seperate as possible - what I mean is don't put all the drives
in one box on the same power supply - one day the PSU will fail and total
all the drives.

Colin