Offsite Backup: Tape, DVDRW, Flash, and REV Drive vs Removable Drives

[Justin Shafer]

What do you guys think is the best method for an offsite backup.

Rotating External Hard Drives... or Any form of media that isnt shock
sensitive.

Very interested to here your thoughts...

 

[J. Clarke]

What do you guys think is the best method for an offsite backup.

Rotating External Hard Drives... or Any form of media that isnt shock
sensitive.

Very interested to here your thoughts...

The issues are cost vs capacity vs convenience. You really have to look at
the volume you're doing then work out the economics of the different
alternatives.

Hard drives today, especially when mounted in some kind of removable
carrier, can take a remarkable beating when powered down. As an example
the Deskstar 7K250s can handle 350G, while the Travelstar 60GB laptop
drives can handle 200G in operation and 1000G powered down. 160 GB seems
to be the sweet spot right now at about 65 cents per gig.

Good tapes are mechanically quite rugged--I can stand on a DLT cartridge and
it doesn't even creak, but the drives are expensive for the capacity--LTO
cartridges are surprisingly cheap these days at about 35 cents a gig for
LTO-I and under 30 cents for LTO-II, but you pay $2000 for a refurbished
LTO-I drive and about 3600 for an LTO-II. Whether that's economically
attractive or not depends on what kind of volume you do--the transition
point between LTO and hard disk comes around the 6 terabyte mark--if your
backup strategy is going to involve that much data being stored at one time
then LTO is worth looking at.

CD-ROM and writeable DVD in is various flavors can be cheap (as low as 20
cents a gig) but the capacity is limited and the cheap media seem to have
problems with a lot of the drives out there. This is fine for small
volumes of data but backing up a hundred gig to DVD without a changer is a
pain, and the few changers on the market are getting up into the tape
library price range, which gets you back to LTO.

 

[Rod Speed]

What do you guys think is the best method for an offsite backup.

There is no single best, that depends on your circumstances.

Rotating External Hard Drives...

The main downside with this approach is that its relatively
expensive and is much more prone to losing your backup
if you drop things much. That problem can be minimised
by using 2.5" laptop drives in well designed enclosures
and moving them around inside a small case with foam
padding, but that adds to the price and effort.

The main advantage is that its the fastest for backup
creation, not needing any human intervention if you
mindlessly do stuff like full image backup say every night
and do the offsite by just taking the drive home with you etc.

or Any form of media that isnt shock sensitive.

This approach is much more robust, particularly as
far as dropping etc is concerned. Not completely
immune from stupidity because its still possible to
do something stupid like manage to leave them
in the sun in your car etc.

Main problem is that mindless full image backups
wont normally fit on a single piece of media, so
the backup cant be completely unattended. Works
fine with proper incremental backup tho in many
situations and thats just a bit of a nuisance to restore.

This is can be cheapest approach, but nothing like as fast.
The speed may not matter tho if it happens unattended.

I personally think tape has passed its useby date for
personal desktop backup, but the media is certainly robust.

DVD is likely robust enough and in some situations like
with video and digital pictures, can be operationally very
convenient if you just write new material to more than
one blank and keep one copy off site. Even CDR can
be quite viable with digital pictures.