Should we backup to tape, or disk?

[Michael_Emerald]

Hi.
We have 10 client w/s here. We presently backup to tape and are enlarging our backup capacity with another server. Presently we backup all PCs to one tape drive, which has outgrown its capacity to perform frequent backups. And we store those tapes off-site.

We have several alternatives. Which is best?

1) Buy an additional tape drive and thus backup to two tape drives simultaneously

2) Backup to disk and backup that (backup) disk onto the existing tape drive. Thus, the off-site tapes would not contain each and every backup job. I.e., the disk would have daily backups, but the tapes would only have every 2nd or 3rd day backups, to be used only in case of disaster recovery.

3) Related, do people use built-in tape drives, or else external tape drives?

4) We also see that there are removable disks, whereby, supposedly, we backup to disk and carry off-site those small disks.

In all, I am asking what Best Practices are for a company with 10 computers for our hardware backup system.

Regards,
Michael Emerald

[Ken_Putnam]

Either Removable HD or Tape drive give you the same capability. Mainly the data can be stored off site, incase of fire, building damage, water damage etc

Disk is generally faster than low end tape drive, but not necessarily faster than high end drives

USB 2.0 is 48Mb/sec or 8 MBytes/sec. For a small network this should be sufficient

Firewire800 is 80MB/sec, Firewire400 is 40 MB/sec would be better for not much more

The only real problems with removable HD (either USB or Firewire) is that each physical disk must be mounted on the same drive letter each time that it is connected. Also, sometimes BackupExec doesn't want to see the new drive even though Windows does.


Running two concurrent jobs to low/mid grade tape drives should not saturate a 100Mb network, so you could go that way tooMessage was edited by:
Ken Putnam

[Keith_Langmead]

Well all those options have their good and bad points.

1) Very good for DR purposes, and if you were dealing with servers I'd definitely go with this option, but for workstations it might be overkill and missing some of the other possible benefits I'll get to shortly.

2) Not as good for DR, but on the flip side you have much faster access to the data to be restored since it's coming from a hard disk. All in all for a desktop I'd probably go with this solution, since you're probably more likely to need to restore data when someone mistakenly deletes something then a true DR system restore.

4) Certainly can work and we've used this method a few times. The only problem with it is that unless you have HDD's which are designed to be moved around (like those for laptops), the lifespan of the drive is dramatically shortend by being moved off-site regularly. We found that after around 6 - 12 months the drives all started to fail, but they were just standard desktop IDE drives, so possibly not best suited to the job.