My webserver died the other day. Fortunately, it was the motherboard. The disk was fine, and I didn't lose any data. I've moved the functionality to my other Linux box, and it all seems to be working fine, so far.

It did bring home the painful fact that I'm extremely slack when it comes to backup. The last time, for example, when I decided to back up my MP3 collection to DVD, I gave up after the first 3 hours of swapping disks.

So, I'm looking at proper backup solutions. Here's my thinking:

1. Tape drives are expensive. For example, VXA2 drives start at £600. DLT drives are over a grand.
2. Hard disks are about the same price as equivalently-sized tapes.
3. However, removable disks require a caddy for each disk. I'm not looking at single-shot backup -- I'm looking at a complete backup every couple of months followed by weekly incremental or differential backups.
4. External hard disks require USB or Firewire connectivity. My Linux box doesn't have working Firewire, and USB1 is dog slow.
5. Hard disks take up quite a lot of space -- they'd be hard to drop into a Jiffy bag and post to my Mum (for offsite storage), for example.

Currently, I'm leaning towards dropping the money on an Exabyte VXA2 drive and a stack of tapes.

Any suggestions?

About how much data are you looking at? Do you use any specific backup software?

Either that, or (if you have Gigabit ethernet) you could use some kind of network attached storage locally.

The Buffalo Technologies Terrastation has gotten some decent reviews. Gigabit ethernet, RAID 5, about $1,000, not to mention the sizes 0.6, 1.0 or 1.6 TB. It's gotten some good reviews recently as well.

-Zeke

Buy two and swap 'em out?

You could use a USB HD to copy data off the Buffalo device, that way you'd have local and offsite data options for only the incremental cost of the USB2 HD. I personally hate tape - it's slow, forces you to do more work to backup/restore, tape heads get dusty & have errors. "Tape drives, oh how I hate you, let me count the ways!"

-Zeke

My problem with extra hard drives is that I'm always drawn to use backup hard drives as futher mainline storage. Can't do that with tapes.

Although, to be fair, for £600, I could just get 5 LaCie 160Gb external firewire drives, and a PCI firewire card (although I think I've actually got one of these in the attic already)...

Do you want to have a "history"? i.e. do you want to go and pull a file out that you deleted a month ago?

Or do you just want a backup of the current machine as it is in case a disk dies?

Based on a quick compare, it looks like VXA2 is probably your price performer. Assuming you want to back up one TB, and assuming you actually get full compression on the tapes, VXA2 is your best bet. In US prices, it comes in a little under AIT2 and DLT4 and significantly under LTO1 and AIT3. (And way below LTO2 and SDLT320.)

In each of those jumps, you get a jump in tape capacity. Basically 80GB vs. 200GB vs. 400GB. This means that you have to swap tapes less often. Obviously.

I did stumble upon a 10-tape VXA2 library for about $1890, which seems like a good deal. That's only three times the cost of a single drive, is external to boot, and raises your drive capacity to 800GB, which means a lot more unattended backup.

Blow 50 quid on a new mobo with USB2 ports, and then just use REALLY BIG IDE drives in external USB2 enclosures. Cheap, and very very fast.

-ml

Or alternatively, blow 20 qiud on a USB2 PCI card.

Cheers

USB2 enclosures really is the way to go. LaCie is the way to go only if you think five minutes with a screwdriver is worth $50.

XE says your 600£ tape drive works out to $1128 in us dollars. Newegg will then exchange those us dollars for 6.79 250GB drives and USB2.0 enclosures. 1.5TB of offline storage. Perfect for two backup of your 600GB raid array. You then setup a USB2.0 hub with three cables and three power supplys, velcro them together so they're all the right length. When it's time to backup, plug your three drives in and run a full backup.

Keep your last drive online for incremental backups, copying a new copy of every updated file to it every night. Then you've got daily roll back for quite a few days, and two compleet backups, which assuming you do them twice a month gets you quite a ways back.

Where tape really excels is when you want to be able to roll back arbitrarily. If you've got accounting data or anything else that needs to be auditable, proper yearly/monthly/weekly/daily rotations can be priceless.

all this coming from the person who "backs up" by upgrading laptops and keeping the old 2.5inch drive after I copy all my files to the new computer. Great roll back, really expensive to keep up to date though.

Matthew