Disk backup hardware

[Nvious1]

Hi all,

Can anyone make any recommendations on some type of storage hardware / disk array that my small business could you to write a secondary (offsite) copy to disk, then swap out disks to allow them to be taking offsite to my home (poor mans offsite DR)? I am looking for something that swapping the disks would be fairly easy. I am willing to take recommendations on my a 2 bay rack-mountable tape unit as well.

Thanks

 

[sminlal]

To some degree it depends on how much data you need to back up - but for basic needs it's hard to beat a simple USB 3.0 external hard drive. Plug it in, run your backup, and then disconnect it and carry it off. Far cheaper than an LTO-5 tape drive and with similar performance and speed. And probably less prone to problems than tape cartridges which only have a useful life of around 250 passes.

 

[Nvious1]

So to give a little bit more detail. Here are some of the requirements I would like to meet but open to suggestions.

Amount of Data to be backed up : ~ 1.5 TB uncompressed

I plan on using Acronis B & R to do my backups and compression. I want to have a couple of disks that I rotate, so that I have at least 2 weekly fulls offsite for retention purposes. I plan on doing daily incrementals but mainly keeping them onsite for point in time recovery.

Not sure if that changes any suggestions, but the just standard USB External Drive still seems like a valid proposal.

 

[sminlal]

Your plan seems pretty reasonable and I think external USB jobs would be perfectly serviceable in that role.

I assume that Acronis has a "verification" function that will tell you if the backups are readable and that all the internal checksums match. What I do with my backups is to run that verify function when the drives come back onsite - that gives me confidence that the drives are working properly and I won't get any surprises if I ever need to rely on them to restore data.