epluribusunix Posted March 25, 2003 Report Share Posted March 25, 2003 The last time this issue was brought up was about a year ago. Since then, media costs have come down even further, and I feel the need to make known how important this issue is. I work at a commercial printing company. We have to archive (store, not just backup) about 3 GB of data each day. In the past, we have used DLT, but our tapes are growing old and media access is becoming flaky or impossible. So in January, I decided to implement an backup and archiving system based on removable IDE hard drives. The speed has been absolutely amazing, bust most importantly, the reliablility of the drives does not keep me up at night. Hard drive backups are superior to tape in just about every way. They are up to twice as fast as the FASTEST tape (four or more times faster than DLT) with instant seek times and transfer rates around the 800 MB per minute range. Hard drives also do not suffer from head-pass degredation and can be accessed as many times as you need. The storage medium itself is also cased in a sealed metal shell, protecting it from both dust and electro-magnetic radiation. And let's not forget than a new tape drive will run you about $4000, versus the $100 I spent on IDE controllers and swappable drive bays. Dantz has done a nice job with the backup and disaster recovery market, but Retrospect is quite lacking when it comes to data archiving. I believe that tape may be on its way out of the archiving sector, and the next company that comes up with a viable solution for hard disk storage will find a great niche. It would be wonderful if Retrospect had the ability to interface with the IDE controller to facilitate hot swaps. And, of course, the catalog would need to be kept separate from the data file. Another good idea would be to format the drive with a special or different file system that the host OS would not recognize. This way, large file size limits of NTFS and FAT file systems would be bypassed, as well as keeping the data secure from malicious users. Kerry Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 26, 2003 Report Share Posted March 26, 2003 Did you have a specific question? Retrospect for Windows has a hard disk backup feature that will span data between hard disks. It works very well. We even have a tutorial that shows how it works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epluribusunix Posted March 26, 2003 Author Report Share Posted March 26, 2003 Yes, I do have a question. What version? And where is the documentation? And why have I been unable to find anythign about such a schema on your site or anywhere else on the web? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 26, 2003 Report Share Posted March 26, 2003 It is Retrospect 6.0 and the support section of our website has several clear links that specifically mention backup to hard disks: http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27441 http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27041 http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase&ACTION=KBASE&id=27235 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
epluribusunix Posted March 26, 2003 Author Report Share Posted March 26, 2003 Thank you very much for those links. I don't know how I missed them. Maybe I just wasn't searching for the right word. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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