How do you archive your backup?

[kdq]

My apologies is this is somewhat off-topic for this forum.

 

I backup on a PC to disk for speed, and I'm currently manually burning DVDs from that disk. I'm used to using mag tape and trusting it for archival purposes, but I haven't used tape in decades and am not familiar with the current technology. My company's IT manager doesn't like tape and thinks I should use disks to archive.

 

Without trying to start a flamewar, how you you do archiving, and those of you using tape, what kind and how reliable and fast is it? I generally add less than 200MB a day to the backup.

 

Also, do you do the backup via Retrospect, or with a separate package?

 

Thanks in advance, and feel free to reply to Kevin@Quitt.net if you feel this is not the right place to discuss this.

[natew]

Hi

 

Tape is still best for long term storage. I'd stick with a newer tape format like AIT, DLT,LTO or VXA.

 

Thanks

Nate

[kdq]

Is there a whitepaper or some kind of report I can point out to my IT guy?

[Eublet]

Use google. Most any D2D manufacturer out there still recommends duplicating backup data to tape for redundancy and/or archive storage. It's just industry standard, and for good reason. Tapes are cheap, small, transportable (for offsite keeping), and much less fragile than disks. It just rounds out the entire backup strategy.

 

Disk storage can be troublesome. Imagine if you lose a disk and/or RAID controller. Rebuilding the volume doesn't always go as planned. I wouldn't trust my archive to disk only, even if it was on duplicated on seperate storage arrays.

[natew]

Hi

 

Here is a D2D2T whitepaper from EMC Dantz

http://www.dantz.com/docs/wp_retro_disk_backups.pdf

 

Thanks

nate