At 02:38 PM 4/13/2010, Brian Pillar wrote:
Anyone out there have any
experience with any backup solutions?
We're looking at an EMC Avamar to give us backup to disk to tape, but the
price tag stands out in a not so good way. I have also looked into
Barracuda's backup service, but it does not appear that the backup data
can be duplicated to tape or another device except in their cloud, and we
are just not comfortable with our data out in a cloud somewhere (at least
not yet).
Thanks,
We use ArcServe (v12.5) to do backups to disk which then get rolled to
tape. At the moment we don't do many backups directly to tape
-- mostly they go to the disk staging area first. The weekly
incremental backups stay on disk for two months. The weekly full
backups get rolled to tape. We retain the weekly backups for two
months (I'd like to make it 3 or 4 months) and retain some of the monthly
backups for up to 3 years. We retain all of the monthly backups for
1 year. In addition to backing up server disks, we do
server-initiated backups of some desktop computers. We also offer a
service whereby desktop computers can back up files to disk, from where
they are written to tape and then deleted from disk. This
works well only for a couple of client backup softwares that I know
of. Actually only one (Cobian). I'm working with the vendor
of another (Paragon) to see if theirs will work in this mode,
too. It doesn't work well this way out of the
box.
The tape system is a LTO4 tape library we bought from Dell -- 24 slots,
one drive.
About a year ago I tried to switch to Yosemite, but found it to be a
tape-wasting system. We went back to ArcServe. We
had been using a previous version of ArcServe for about 10 years, with a
DLT tape drive system.
Two-thirds of the monthly backups get carried to off-site storage
locations. These locations are cabinets inside equipment closets in
buildings within easy walking distance.
John Gorentz
