backups to another hard drive?

The backup hard drive could fail.
Then you would be dependant upon the tape backups only.
And, if you had a file backed up on the failed hard drive only and NOT on a tape backup, then the source file needs to be restored, you would not have a copy to restore with.
Yes, tape is the way to go. Multiple tapes, used in rotation, some kept for long periods, and stored offsite is the norm.

Hi

Joseph has it nailed

fred

The reason tape is always used for backup is that the media holding all the data i.e the tape itself has no mechanical parts to fail. If the mechanical parts on the hard drive you are backing up to fails then you have a major problem. Yes data recovery companies could possible get this info back for you by taking the drive apart in a clean room, but if you are going to pay them to do this it might as well be on the original drive that has failed.

Tape drives are easily replaced. But it is not always wise to use hardware compression because if the drive you use to recover is slightly different it may not work.

This seems to be a good strategy.
We also run simple batch script that xcopies data from main server to backup server and to backup server off-site. If HDD on the backup server fails, well, you'll have to re-build the server. Considering it's just a backup server, you shouldn't worry about your users not being able to work while you do that.
Keep the tape backups as well, but make sure to rotate them on- and off-site. The problem here is that you'll need to keep the versions of backup software you used. If you upgrade the server OS, and say it would require upgrading backup software, make sure you still can read the older tapes. If you can't read them, you'll have to use the old version to restore tape and than back it up with new version.

I setup all my clients to backup in this way, but usually I setup a CDRW, DVR, or USB Hard Drive for their offsite media. My experience shows Tape to be VERY unreliable. Tapes have to be handled carefully to keep the data safe and many times I've had customers think they have a good backup and they don't. The only reason I see for tapes is for very large amounts of data (100G or more).
The chances of 2 or more Hard Drives failing simultaneously is rare except for fires, tornadoes, lightning, and similar disasters. Usually I setup folders for each day of the week and backup to each day modified backups, except for one day, like Monday, when it does a complete backup. Setup the schedule in Scheduler and it runs itself. For more redundancy you can mirror the backup to other Hard Drives on the network.

If you have mutliple WIN2K or higher servers, setup a DFS root which keeps the same data on multiple server's HDs. This is not a replacement for backups, (corruption can still happen) but protects against a hard disk or even a Server failure keeping the data available.

What the others failed to mention is that you need to evaluate what the loss of the data would cost your org to rebuild. I work in an educational K-12 enviroment where most of our data is not mission critical so we use Hard drive backups to protect student created data as well as applications and save our tape backups for our financial data, server configurations and student records.

This question was closed by the author