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Someone explain tape backup from installation to restore please

Tags:
  • Storage
  • Backup
  • Systems
  • Management
Last response: in Business Computing
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June 19, 2014 8:31:01 AM

My boss wants backups of certain key systems that he can take home. These systems though will be slowly expanding so I need a backup solution that will happen once a month and can expand.

I'm leaning towards tape backup, but I don't really understand how it works. If I want to backup say 12TBs, and I have 1 tape loader with 4x3TB tape media. When the first tape fills up will it ask me for a another tape until it is done? Similar to when a 4 CD installation is occurring. That way when the server goes beyond 12TBS I can just add more tapes to the mix. Reusing older tapes and adding new ones.

I can't seem to find tutorials on tape backups from beginning to end. I didn't even know that tapes were referred to as "media" until recently. Can someone explain tape backup from a hardware level and installation, to usage and software levels. Even when restoring.

More about : explain tape backup installation restore

a b G Storage
June 19, 2014 8:39:00 AM

There may be a better solution if you have that much data to back up, they do actually make "hot-swap" hard drive backup enclosures now that function just like tape but you just swap out the hard drives instead of swapping out a tape. That's a lot of data to backup anyways, how regularly did you plan on backing up? What is the point of recovery you are looking for? At my place of business, we have our important stuff backing up to tape daily, so that at worst we would lose a day of data (if we only had the tapes to rely on, we also backup to several NAS devices). But, our tapes are only around 600GB I think.
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June 19, 2014 8:54:30 AM

chugot9218 said:
There may be a better solution if you have that much data to back up, they do actually make "hot-swap" hard drive backup enclosures now that function just like tape but you just swap out the hard drives instead of swapping out a tape. That's a lot of data to backup anyways, how regularly did you plan on backing up? What is the point of recovery you are looking for? At my place of business, we have our important stuff backing up to tape daily, so that at worst we would lose a day of data (if we only had the tapes to rely on, we also backup to several NAS devices). But, our tapes are only around 600GB I think.


This will be a once a month backup. Weekly depending on how well it works. Right now though it was just requested to be once a month. We have a lot of data total, about 50TBs for the entire company. We run projects involving large Raw images. When the project finishes they are offloaded onto backup drives and stored away, but we need a backup that can make a incremental backup everyday. That's another story, we'll probably end up doing a SAN since it needs to happen every night.

This is a branch of the company that is about 6TBs right now, but will increase over time. It doesn't need to be backed up every day though since it is websites. The PHP/HTML files are small and backed up daily on a storage website, and the data never changes so its ok if it isn't daily.


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a b G Storage
June 19, 2014 9:24:41 AM

There is a lot to strategies of backing up data.....first, you need to determine a few things:
1) What actually needs to be backed up - typically, you don't backup program files, operating systems, etc.....you are concerned with data, configuration files and such. Basically, if you have the installation media - you don't need to back up those items, just the configuration files and data.
2) What frequency of backups - you need to determine how often data should be backed up. If your data doesn't change on a daily basis, you don't need to back it up daily. You also have the option of creating a weekly "full backup" and daily "differential backups" (this keeps the daily backup small - to restore, you would do the weekly full restore, then restore each differential).
3) On-site storage vs. off-site storage. Typically I keep 4 weekly backups plus differentials on site, and store the others off-site. Once a month, I pull one set of weekly backups to go into permanent storage and insert a new set of weekly tapes. Tapes are not utilized more than 4 weeks in the backup cycles this way. You should check with your legal department to determine the length of time to keep backups - different industries require different backup strategies for possible litigation risks.
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a b G Storage
June 19, 2014 9:32:47 AM

Tape backup is "easy":
- from hardware point of view, this is (usually) 5.25"-style drive, either internal or external. Autoloaders tend to be external. This drive is usually connected with SCSI / SAS adapter. The "media" is a cassette with tape inside.
- from software point of view - Windows used to have bare-functionality backup utility, NTBackup, which supported tape drives. Unix have always had tape support. But neither of these would work with tape loaders, and multi-tape backups.

With that much crytical data to deal with, I would suggest lookigng at backup solutions from big OEMs - Dell, HP, IBM. Single LTO-6 drive (capable of 2.5tb of data) costs in excess of $3000. Plan on suitable SCSI/SAS adapter as well, and software package which has tape management and tracking, and you are looking at at least $5k solution. I would not go to Amazon with these monety.
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a c 928 G Storage
June 19, 2014 9:36:46 AM

You have 50TB of data. How much of that changes or is added weekly/monthly?
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a c 928 G Storage
June 19, 2014 9:39:22 AM

Moving this to Business Computing. You'll likely get deeper answers there.

With that much data, you are looking at a non-trivial solution. And it involves much more than "My boss wants backups of certain key systems that he can take home."
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June 19, 2014 10:36:54 AM

This is all great information. Ronintexas made me think about what exactly needs to be backed up. A lot of the servers are just basic Win 2008 r2 installations, and people save their projects to them. Backing the system image up isn't necessary. So the important thing is backing up the projects. From that point, it's only important to back up active projects daily. The rest of the completed projects can be offloaded to a external HDD and stored off-site in a safe location. Then even deeper in the projects really the older RAW data (if the project is very long) can be offloaded also. And the processed part of the project is backed up daily.

Once that is all broken down, there's definitely TBs of data that is backed up, but not on a daily basis. Most of it can be moved onto external drives and somewhere else. The daily backup of active projects, and more recent project work might only come down to maybe 10TBs total of space.

From there it's just an investment of organization and data management on the drives.
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