I was following your post and I have to say that I have definitely fallen into similar situations as you have, both in private contracts and employers alike. Budgets seem to get smaller and smaller until there's a problem, and then the wallets come out.
The hard part is to push the I told you so's into a more proactive approach, as to avoid the pinching pain of the scathing critics on the projects. Over the years, I have managed to push the clients agenda only so far, until I come across a scenario where business continuity is in jeopardy, and then it is their choice.
I have always liked SATA connections over USB when in a pinch, as an external SATA card can be used, or if you have an additional slot, you can put a 10$ expansion esata port in. That way, the drive that you have connected is viewed by the OS as perpetually connected, and thus is more reliable when you use windows backup, symantec, or some third party software.
Either way, I was curious on the stability of the hardware/software combo that you used. Congrats, and good luck on future projects.
But then again the Destructions for use where probably written before a Change which threw out all of the instructions with the Baby. 
Lets know how things get on with this one JD.
Col
Too bad with <i>wrong instructions</i> you were given. Probably not the first time you have encountered that, right? :^0
(I will never forget my experience with MS support making things worse for a user, which I had to straighten out. And then pretty much hound them for their errors. Well, they asked for feedback...)
Went with a Quantum SATA drive, DAT72.
It came with Symantec backup exec. To activate, they say go to their website, but of course the link is dead. (nice job Quantum, way to be on the ball!).
Go to the main page and able to register the drive, but nothing to activate the software. (nice job Quantum, way to be on the ball!).
Call their "support" and the fool who answered thought it was OBVIOUS that it was a different link to symantec (even though the printed instructions THEY provided say otherwise)
(nice job Quantum, way to be on the ball!).
After filling out the form and waiting for about 20 minutes, the activation code FINALLY comes in. Of course it isn't in a form that I can just copy/paste in, so I have to type it in. (I guess I can blame Symantec for this one)
Have the server running a Full backup to make sure everything is working properly, and will move all services over to the server tomorrow if everything goes well.
I bought 17 320 GB drives (1 yearly, 4 weekly and 12 monthly) for offsite backup (roughly 200 GB a week) and use a 750 GB and a 1 TB for onsite backups.
I have found restores to be much quicker than tape (obviously) and all backups run just fine and within reasonable time frames.
Microsoft Exchange is a tad slow but I think it's my Exchange server and not the drives.
Each 320 GB drive at the time was $59.99 and we use Symantec Backup Exec. Been doing this for several years now and not a single drive has failed yet.
BTW, I also noticed someone said heat could be an issue with externals. Not here. I use Seagate drives that spin down when not in use and don't get hot and don't suck down a lot of electric.
...I do the external drive thing. A trusted employee takes them off-site. They're rsnc'ed nightly.
I remember working with tapes for years very well. I remember a worn out tape, corrupted data, and unhappy folks.
Also, with the quantities of data we're dealing with now, the external drive just seems to be the better alternative.
You do have to coach the folks on procedures do they don't damage the drives though. That is a drawback.
that's been my experience and seems as well as everyone elses. No one knows if there's something on the tape until emergency time.
Hopefully your customer realizes that someone's gotta look at the data on the tape. That's where Justin's USB HDDs are more appealing. you can actually look into the drive and check files and folders. Might require some prelim steps to make sure the backup software finds the right drive, but atleast someone can look at the data easily enough to verify it's there.
simply present the fact that they are reducing their TCO by reducing the setup from 4 servers down to one
and thus can afford a higher quality tape setup
just the power savings alone would make up the difference in a very short time frame
from the cheap to higher end tape drive and tapes
I have a little experience with Tape Drives.
HP which covers a wide range of Drive Makes, make a part way decent drive but they don't repair them they replace them while Under Guarantee and when they are no longer UG they expect you to buy new.
Works OK provided that you don't need backward compatibility as I've had several customers who use HP tape drives that needed data off Tapes written to by the Old Drives. Their newly replaced drives didn't read the tapes even though they where the same form factor.
These days there are a multitude of SATA Drives that are available and they all seem to work well. The Internal USB ones that I've seen use 2 USB Ports to increase Data Speed but can be a bit flaky when used with Windows but seem to work OK when used on a Nix based system.
My personal preference these days is for the Tandenberg Drives but they are sort of pricey and more high end probably too expensive for what your company wants at the moment. Of course when they loose Data and can not recover it they see them as cheap.
Sony has some decent low end Drives as well and then there are the IBM drives used in Tape Libraries which are way overpriced but very good. I love the things they just are unlikable but by the same token you pay for them to begin with.
Just go with what you can afford or have budgeted and make sure that they are bolted to a metal frame to disperse as much heat as possible. It doesn't hurt having 2 drives if they are low end drives that way you can recover off the second drive in the file cabinet when the first one fails. Great if the replacement drive that is supplied doesn't read the old tapes which is very common.
I just flog 2 drives every time that I need to and keep one as a backup so that when the Drive fails you can still have access to the Data. It's much cheaper than needing to send the Tape to a Data Recovery Specialist . I've needed to do that on more than 1 occasion and the companies see just how cheap a second drive is in comparison.
Just remember to get a Cleaning Tape and use it regularly it's very important with these drives.
Col
Have you used SATA or USB Tape Backups successfully?
Have need for a tape backup, the server does not have a SCSI controller and do not have the budget to add one.
I need a low cost backup solution, that includes looking at both the price of the drive as well as the price of the media for it. We currently have SCSI DAT72 on another system that is about to be phased out, so leaning hard to stay with DAT72 just so we don't have to invest in new tapes for a bit.
I have seen several tape backups listed online in the 500 to 700 range, some by HP looked good to me.
My question is, has anyone had any personal success or failure using either SATA or USB drives?
Both fit my budget (which is almost nothing). Not a lot being backed up and done at night, so I don't care about the speed of the backup. Just want one that will be dependable.
The server is a low end HP running Windows Server8.
Thanks in advance for your input.