Alternate media suggestions?

[theboyk]

Hello.

For the last 4 years we've been running a daily, alternate script that runs one backup set on Tuesday & Thursday and the other on MWFSS. This allows me to take offsite each night the previous days work — thus, if something terrible every happened to the studio, we'd only be a day behind, etc. My problem is, we've gone from a 8 person studio to a 30+ in the last two years and we're chewing through our removable media like there's no tomorrow! Every times 4 tapes (8 if you count the alternating cycles) fills up, we start fresh, etc. The system is pretty much nailed down so we don't waste tape/space (only backing up unaltered artwork, only backing up specific "work in progress" folders on the client systems, etc. But, again, with the amount of people we now have, we're going through the media in no time.

 

We're backup up to a Sony AIT-2 Turbo drive/tapes (208GB compressed/80GB native) and it's just not cutting it anymore — as we're burning through these tapes every few months (we don't recycle the tapes, once used we store offsite and start with fresh new tapes for the next cycle) and with the cost of the tapes, it's becoming very expensive. And, these tapes aren't easy to get — it takes weeks to get them in.

 

So, I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for other media that'll work in a backup setup like this?

 

Thanks,

Kristin.

[twickland]

You may want to take a look at an LTO (Ultrium) tape drive. LTO-3 is 400 GB native; LTO-4 is 800 GB native. The tapes themselves are relatively inexpensive (currently $30 or so for LTO-3 and around $70 for LTO-4 cartridges) and are readily available from a greater selection of manufacturers than AIT.

[theboyk]

Thanks!!!