We’re looking at upgrading our backup solution (currently Veritas w/DLT tapes) and the president, knowing nothing about backup solutions, keeps asking why we don’t archive to DVD or another optical media. Aside from the space issues (we are doing about 300GB a night) what advantages does tape offer over optical?
If anyone knows of a good article comparing the two media formats I would really appreciate the link.
Thanks!
You use **Archiving ** and **Backup ** interchangeably. Your daily job is probably backup, i.e. you need it for a relatively short period of time in the event that you need to restore from it. For backup, I would think that tape is fine. For Archival (i.e. for administrative of legal reasons you need to keep certain data for a period measured in years if not decades), tape is a rather fragile medium. I would think Optical is better suited for that purpose, but offhand I don’t have an article in mind.
Excellent point, I should have been more clear. This is primarily for backup purposes (ie the dog ate my files and I need them restored).
PCWorld Ultimate Backup Guide
I will confess to having read only the first page, but this seems like it would help you. It goes beyond just Tape vs. DVD, but that is in there too. If this isn’t what you want, i apologize, but i hope it will help.
That guide is over three years old, though.
I’m increasingly keen on the idea of using regular IDE disks for backups, for small organisations anyway. They continually get cheaper, unlike tape and optical media which do so only sporadically and usually lag behind.
Consider a typical scenario: you have at most 200GB to back up, which you do by means of daily incremental or differential backups which all fit on one tape/disk, weekly backups going back four weeks, and monthly backups going back four months. That requires nine tapes or disks, and some means of making them available for read/write, i.e. a tape drive or an optical drive or, in the case of hard disks, a NAS device or even just the USB2 port on a spare computer (the disks being mounted in USB caddies).
Well, at my local internet computer store, 200GB Ultrium tapes cost about 20, and Ultrium tape drives cost about 800, for a total of 980. 200GB disks in USB caddies cost about 75, a Linksys NAS box costs 65, total 840. I don’t know if you can even get 200GB optical media.
So not only do hard disks make faster, more durable, and more convenient backup media, they can be cheaper too.
yeah, if you were actually archiving, using an archival quality optical media would be the way to go, assuming you couldn’t afford a magnetic archive system (ie an EMC or HP SAN).
For backups, well, DLT is extremely fast compared to DVD, etc, and has been designed for backup solutions. I don’t know that there are a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for doing nightly backup of 300GB of data to DVDs.