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Suggested backup hw for midsized co.?

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by dinsdalep 1 view

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Hello all,
I am looking for suggestions to replacing our SureStore 24x6 DAT tape drives. We use Veritas Backup Exec 7.3 currently as the sw but it's an old version and we could change that too if needed. We have about 40 users on an NT network with an NT4sp6 PDC. The backups currently run from the PDC. Most of the users are on WinXP. We currently back up close to the max on one 24 gig dat tape each night. The SureStore is probably 4 years old and we're getting more and more crc errors onit and now the fan stopped. Is anyone using something newer with similar capabilites that they really like? Ease of use, ability to schedule jobs for the coming week, and price are important factors. Or.. is there a company out there that fixes HP SureStore 24x6 DAT drives? :)

TIA!
Ray

9 replies

by reynoldsii

I have four different tape library systems 3 from Compaq and one from Dell. As it turns out they are nothing more than Exabyte units with some little tweak to make it thier own, the all work great.

by lordinfidel

Are you backing up every single person's hdd.

6x24= 144gigs of data.

If this is the case, I would stop this practice immediately and move to centralized storage.

I mean I have alot more users than that, and my file server is at 75 gigs of info.

For my local lan I only use 4 20/40 dds4 drives.

Are you doing a full backup everynight? If so, you don't have to. You can do an daily incremental and a weekly full (on sat/sun).

Backup Exec will allow you to cascade the drives into adrive set. So I would put 3or4 of the drives into a drive set and use that set for the full backups. And keep the other 3/2 drives open for daily incrementals.

For my production servers however, each location has a PowerVault 130T which holds 30 DLTIV tapes and can have up to 3 DLT Drives in it. Each tape does 70gigs, and using backup exec It will rotate the tapes automatically. But I am also backing up a terabyte+ of information w/o user intervention.

by dinsdalep

We aren't backing up all the users but we do back up a lot of images and yes, we have been doing a full backup each night. The guy who set up this system said that it was much faster and easier to restore things that way but maybe he just didn't understand how to use incrementals (I don't either, yet). He's gone now and I'm trying to learn about backup systems and get us up to date as quickly as possible. Thanks for replying!

Ray

by lordinfidel

There is a time and a place for both.

If your backups of a file server are small, like 5 or less gigs, then go ahead and do a full.

If they are more then that.

The standard is, once a week do a full, then a daily incremetal.

For my file servers I b/u full on saturday.

E-mail (exchange mailboxes) get's a full backup nightly. While the IS (using native ntbackup) get's a full every other day, but saved to disk.

The full backup only saves time in the case of a complete disaster.
But using BackupExec makes this very easy. Apply the full backup. The apply the next incremental backups.

I personally like the incremental, just for the fact that if a user complains to me about their file being altered, I can see excatly the day it was changed.
And the

by lordinfidel

I would exclude my images directory. (as long as the images I think you are talking about are ghost images)

In fact, I created a seperate server to strictly house my ghost images.

by tomsal

Just thought I'd throw that in there...Ghost is one of my favorite "tools" of all time. Many of hours and toil were saved because of Ghost.

(Pending you keep them updated every so often)

I do just what LordInfidel does...full backups for us are on Sunday instead of Saturday. (Because sometimes people come to work on Saturdays). We do daily incrementals.

We use a Powervault 110T for our main DB server too...that works great!

by lordinfidel

I use Ghost with M$'s SysPrep. It makes my life very easy when cloning 2k machines.

Configure and install all of my programs.
Run sysprep and shutdown.
Clone the machines with ghost.

and I just saved myself 4 hours per machine.

(just restating the obvious for everyone else's benefit)

by madroxxx

If price is your primary concern then the onstream drives are a cheap and good solution. They come in a 50 gig config for about $650. On the other hand DLT/sdlt is tried and true technology. Why it may cost a bit more it works well and is fast.

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