Tapebackup nethserver

I know that this one will make you laugh,
But why not include tape backups to into the backup gui options… Just in case

@Vitor_Hugo_Barbosa

Hi Vitor!

Tape backup is “too” storage:
Too slow, too unreliable (needs cleaning again…), too expensive, too hard to get/find hardware, even tapes, too small…

Now, if we were talking about a reliable punchcard monstrosity. Each punched hole is one bit of data… Now, that’s what I call backup! :slight_smile:

My 2 cents
Andy

It seems to me fair enough… :wink:

Which tape drive you own?

AFAIK, tape is still used in enterprise datacenters. And in principle, it would make a lot of sense to keep your media offline (out of the drive), and you’re dealing with media that’s designed to have a long storage life to be useful for archival data storage. But they are expensive (the largest capacity I find with a quick search, a LTO8 drive, holds 12 TB, costs $3k, and tapes are $100 each), and they’re kind of slow. I don’t think they’re hard to find (Google knows everything, of course, but heck, even Amazon sells them), but I’m having trouble seeing how they’d make sense in the SMB setting.

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@danb35

Don’t forget the human factor when it comes to reliability.
Tapes often not changed, cleaning not done, etc.

Tapes, when used daily, need a weekly cleaning of the drive heads.
Means you more or less need a changer with at least 8 cartridges…

Now, those are really expensive…

Used DAT, LTO and other formats in the past, with and without changers…
LTO drives are large, even without changers. With a changer, they often twice as large.

SME Server still supported Tape out of the box. But it had to be SCSI…

My 2 cents
Andy

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DONNE won’t take that further :slight_smile: issue solved … thanks guys

IMVHO the sense is to buy a refurbished (with support/replacement service) far smaller capacity tapedrive (LTO6 or 5) associated with a network backup software like Amanda. Depends on size, a lot of cache is useful (slow transfers waste lot of capacity on LTO)
This can generate a lot more independent copies of your universe, associating network backup of multiple servers and/or datastore (if there’s any hypervisor plugin available for directly backup the hosts).
At friday there could be a full backup, then incremental from Monday to Thursday. At end of the week, not skilled personal could eject the weekly tape and put the further one.
3 tapes for weeks. 3 tapes for months, 3 tapes for quarter. 1 for Year.
Yes that’s not “that” cheap, but the problem on one tape cannot create issues for other copies, which could happen if you do not have multiple media backup policy (NAS + USB or NAS + USB + remote). Having the same data depth on network storage is quite expensive too, and it’s not that reliable (Nas, PSU, Disks, connection). With a tapedrive, you can create a whole set of backup without changing procedures, only using a new tape. Which if dropped, should survive a bit easily than an hard drive.

How much does cost a NAS grade 4 TB USB Hard Drive? LTO6 tape is around 50-60 euros…

@pike

To make an independant Backup of my clients Synologys, I use a Seagate Backup Hub Plus with 8 or 10 TB! (USB3 connected). These contain Ironwolf disks, AFAIK.
The 8TB was around 180 last summer, it’s cheaper now…

Note:
I stopped using LTO tapes about 5 years ago, since then switched to multiple generation and cascaded storage for my 25-30 clients.
I’ve had exactly two PSU outages with this concept since then!

Using Tape, I had issues almost every other month - with several clients.
And - when needed - the wrong tapes In-House… :frowning:

My 2 cents
Andy

I had experience with few LTO tape drives, all HP (now HPE) Ultrium. The only issue i had were with very old tapes used a lot (4 years, 20 tapes switched)

@pike

I used HP’s Ultrium too, they were quite good. We even had changers for DATs and one for LTOs.
The DAT changer had 8 DATs, 7 real DATs and a cleaner DAT. DATs were more suseptible for cleaning requirements, due to the ferro-dust from the tapes.

At the time we were using Veritas Backup (Before Symantec bought/ruined it!).
We also used a lot of Plug-Ins for Veritas, eg Novell, Exchange, GroupWise and others.
The software was quite good.

But restoring a single file was often a chore for a couple of hours, disaster recovery took “a little longer”!

With Network backups, and a whole week of backups in direct access, it’s a matter of minutes to restore a single file!

My 2 cents
Andy