Re: [WinMac] Need advice on a backup solution
Tim Scoff(casper[at]nb.net)
Fri, 07 Jan 2000 12:38:25 -0500
There are a couple of reasons to go with a tape drive instead of a
hard drive for backups.
1. You may need to go back to a backup that is months old. A tape drive
allows you to archive multiple versions of data for long periods of time.
A hard drive solution allows you to archive data for one or two days only.
I have seen people have to redo work becuase they overwrote their backup
every day instead of rotating backups over an extended period when they
deleted data on Monday and then tried to get it back on Friday.
2. Computers crash. If your server crashes while you're in the middle of a
backup and you're backing up to a hard drive you may have just lost
everything, both the server's hard drive and the backup. With a tape drive
you still have the previous night's backup.
3. Off site data storage is easy with tapes. It's difficult with a hard
drive.
I don't consider $4000 a bad price for a tape backup solution. I
consider less than $2000 a mistake for important data, and no one takes the
time to back up anything that isn't important.
My suggestion would be to go with a tape autoloader so that you can
have multiple tapes in the drive and change tapes once a week. You can
also do incremental or differential backups with a full backup one day a
week which can help reduce the amount of data that you need to back up
every night.
Ask your director how important his data and his time is. Point out
to him that if he goes with a backup solution that isn't reliable and his
hard drive crashes he will have to redo all of his work. Now magnify that
time investment in the data which you're backing up every night by everyone
in the department and how much it will cost his budget in time to have all
of the data that you are backing up recreated from scratch if the backup
isn't good enough. At that price $4000 is cheap.
--On Friday, January 07, 2000, 11:05 AM -0500 Aaron Ciesar
<aciesar@stroke.upmc.edu> wrote:r
> I have recommended to my department director that we purchase an AIT2 tape
> drive to back up our network. My network is a mix of 50/50 Macs and PCs
> using Retrospect 4.2 as the backup software. My network server is ASIP
> 6.3 and I have a minimum of 15GB of data per full backup from 20
> computers.
>
> After presenting my director with my recommendation and the quoted price
> from the vendor ($4000), he immediately began insisting that I use a 30GB
> hard drive instead because "hard drives are cheaper".
>
> After arguing with him for a half hour, I was unable to convince him that
> using a hard drive is a really bad idea. None of the technical arguments
> would convince him.
>
> What I need is some additional ammo as to why a 30GB hard drive is a
> really bad idea and an AIT2 tape drive is a good idea. Any technical,
> financial, philosophical, and personal experiences would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance...
>
> --
>
> Aaron B. Ciesar
> Data Manager/Analyst
> UPMC Stroke Institute
>
>
>
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Tim Scoff
tim@scoff.net
http://www.scoff.net/Tim
(412) 422-5242
Pager 602-7738
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. The world's only fully buzzword compliant
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