Best Practice for backing up to Hard drive

[sylvainlemire]

I've been using tape for backup for many years. I'm currently using DDS-4 technology and I am tired of the problems it carries, mainly head cleaning problems, out of sync errors and lenght of tape. I ususlly fill 25 12-gig tapes before recycling them. I backup a server and 10 users. I pay around 1.50$/gig (all prices Canadian dollars) excluding tape drive.

I was planning to step up to AIT but the drive prices got me thinking again. Tapes are also in the range of 1.50$/gig.

I'm thinking of using many 320gig external firewire drives for my backup devices. These would cost about 2$/gig but I wouldn't need anything else. I can always recycle those drive later if I find another solution that best suits my needs.

I still want my backups to be incremental for my server.

What is the best way to set-up the scripts and devices. Thanks.

 

sylvain@lemire.com

[kaikow]

I don't use a server, but I too have gotten tired of the problems inherent in using tapes, so except for the matter of scale, you could do something along the following lines, which is what I did for my main system:

 

System has 3 SCSI hard drives, SCSI CD-ROM drive, SCSI tape drive, ATAPI ZIP and a good ole floppy drive. I had been using BackUp MyPC (BUMP) 4.85,

 

Takes about 16 hours to do a full backup and verify, using 5 tapes (currently used about 19GB out of about 64GB of hard drives). This can only get worse as disk space used increases, not to mention tapes needing to be replaced.

 

So, I bit the bullet and purchased the following on 5 June 2003:

 

1. An Adaptec USB 2 card.

2. Plextor ATAPI CD-RW, yes, I sold out, it's not SCSI.

3. Two Maxtor 500LE external USB drives (80GB each), again, not SCSI.

4. Nero 5.5 Burning ROM. Plextor drive came with Roxio software.

5. Retrospect Pro 6.5 Upgrade edition. I qualified for the upgrade because the Maxtor drives came with Retro Express. I also could have gotten the Competitive Upgrade because I had BUMP.

 

As each Maxtor drive has more capacity than the total of my internal hard drives, the strategy is to alternate between the two Maxtor drives. So I created a script for a backup set on each drive. I use the Run menu to exceute the scripts.

 

I do not have more than 1 USB drive connected, or plugged in, at the same time to reduce chance of problems from power outages/sureges. It was my intention to keep both disconnected when not in use, but I've been living dangerously and keeping 1 connected at all times. This dangerous living does have the advantage of encouraging more frequent backups as I need not fiddle with connecting the drive.

 

To make things even easier, I added a Retrospect icon to the desktop.

 

I backup up the Retrospect catalog files and config65.dat to a CD-RW media.

I backup config65.dat to the ZIP drive.

 

My system does not have the horsepower to support reliable DVD writing.

If it did, I would do some backups to DVDs too, oh well, that's for my next system.

 

Note that a full backup/verify on my system currently takes about 6.5 hours. That's a lot better than 16 hours and I don't have to mess with swapping tapes in and out for backup/compare. However, the time is disappointing compared with BUMP. I used BUMP to back up to the USB drives, total time was only about 3.5 hours. It would be nice to see Retrospect improve performance.

 

The biggest disappointment has been how poorly done is the InCD and EasyWrite Reader software from Ahead. Not sure that Roxio's stuff is any better. So far, I'vre not found an EWR that works in Win 98.

 

For example, today, just for the H-E-double hocky sticks of it, I tried to read the CD-RW containing the copy of the catalogs in the CD-ROM drive. For whatever reason, Windows Explorer showed NO files on the media. When the media is in the CD-RW drive, the files are seen.

 

So, I quickly, reformatted the CD-RW (using InCD 3.5.24.0, because all versions of InCD 4.* have a serious bug that causes the dates to be changed), then copied the files to the CD-RW.

Voila, the CD-ROM drive now was able to show the files.

 

Obviously, the CD writing software industry still has some problems to solve, so I would never rely on CD/DVD media for backup, at least not yet. In some ways, I view this as the CD recording industry getting even with me due to my role in designing, and writing, the relevant ISO and ECMA standards for the volume and file structure.