hairyjim Posted October 2, 2006 Report Share Posted October 2, 2006 Hi all, I am considering upgrading from 6.5 to 7.5 and I wished to know if there were any significant advantages in doing so? Are there any disc backup enhancements I could expect in an upgrade? I would also like to change our data backup strategy from a tape backup to disc backup and I wondered if there were any recommendations for such configurations? Specifically I would be interested in knowing the drive(s) you use and also the backup rate you get for the drive. Cheers Jim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted October 2, 2006 Report Share Posted October 2, 2006 Hi Jim, I think one of the largest advantages for you in upgrading to 7.5 would be the disk grooming feature. This allows you to remove older snapshots and associated files from disk backup sets. Using this you can trim your backups without having to run a recycle backup, which will cut down on backup times and won't leave you without a backup history at any point. The disks you use for this will depend largely on how you intend to manage your data. If you want to have offsite capability, you can buy external USB or FireWire hard drives which are easily portable. If speed is an issue for you internal SATA or SCSI drives might be a better alternative. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hairyjim Posted October 3, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 3, 2006 Yeah the grooming feature looks good. Would this still allow me to have offsite storage though? Essentially I wish to use external drives which I can take away for offsite storage. I envisage 3 drives being in use, 1 in the fireproof safe (onsite), 1 in use (onsite), and 1 stored offsite. I did some quick tests with a Western Digital FireWire drive (250 GB). I found that the data rate to the drive was very poor. The rate I got backing-up the local machine was around 400MB/Min. I was expecting much higher numbers than this, at least 800MB/Min. When I did just a normal file copy (1GB) to the drive it copied in 50 seconds, which is great and would be ideal as a backup rate! this would allow me to copy all the data on my servers in less than 6 hours! So what Im trying to get at is what drives do people use for backup (specifically external HDD firewire) and what data rates do you see? Also what factors can affect the data rate? Thanks Jim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekr0phage Posted October 3, 2006 Report Share Posted October 3, 2006 Jim, Why are you thinking this would prohibit your offsite storage abilities? With a three disk rotation as you describe, you'll want to have one backup set per disk, and grooming will simply allow you to better manage the backup set on each disk. From what I understand you'll need to obtain special drivers to unlock the full potential of firewire 800 on a Windows machine. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I believe this is the company that you would need to contact: http://www.orangeware.com/developers/1394b.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hairyjim Posted October 4, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 4, 2006 Sorry I am not using Firewire 1394b (800 Mbps), I am using Firewire 1394 (400 Mbps). I think the slight confusion may have come in when I noted my data transfer rates. Basically I was getting 6 MB's per second and I was expecting at least 10-20 MB's per second. So I was interested to know what drives people may be using and what speeds they see. I am not sure if it is the drive has a poor performance or that the software is causing the slow transfer. This is all done locally and not across a network. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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