Backup recommendations

On Tue, 15 Jul 2003 11:01:32 -0500
"Lynn McGuire" wrote:

1) Backup entire hard drive to tape (currently 30GB HD of highly
compressable content, only about 8GB or so used so far)

1. Get a USB2 external hard drive and use RoboCopy to copy your
hard drive to it

2. Get a Seagate Travan 20/40 GB tape drive (IDE)
http://www.pcconnection.com/scripts/...asp?product_id
=287035

Not a good option. Travans tend to be considerably less than reliable
in service and the tapes are horribly expensive for the capacity.
Compare the price of a 20 gig Travan cartridge with that of a 20 gig
DDS-4 cartridge. The downside is that the drives are more expensive.

Lynn

--
--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)

In article ,
Lynn McGuire wrote:
1. Get a USB2 external hard drive and use RoboCopy to copy your
hard drive to it

Not a great idea. Robocopy won't backup your Windows registry.
--
David Arnstein

2. Get a Seagate Travan 20/40 GB tape drive (IDE)

Not a good option. Travans tend to be considerably less than reliable
in service and the tapes are horribly expensive for the capacity.
Compare the price of a 20 gig Travan cartridge with that of a 20 gig
DDS-4 cartridge. The downside is that the drives are more expensive.

I used a 10 / 20 GB Seagate IDE tape drive for 3 years with very
few problems. I used 6 tapes in rotation, writing a new tape once
a week. I did have to throw away a tape towards the end of the
time that I used that drive because the tape broke. I stopped
using the drive since I needed more space (I now use a 80 GB
Exabyte VXA-2 tape drive).

Thanks,
Lynn

1. Get a USB2 external hard drive and use RoboCopy to copy your
hard drive to it

Not a great idea. Robocopy won't backup your Windows registry.

True. Robocopy is OK for data. Not OK for a disaster backup.
Use Ghost, etc in that case.

Different needs for different people. If I have a disaster, I would
rather build the machine from scratch and then restore the data
after a clean install of all software including the OS.

Thanks,
Lynn

john:
you might want to take a look at Dant'z Retrospect Pro 6.5...Its allows you to do a full system backup to tape and also will create
a bootable diasaster recovery cdrom.....
I would verify the that it supports whatever tape device you plan on using...

If this is win2k or win2k3 server, win2k has ntbackup whoch will allow you to do a full system backup by running ascript to
tape....its also has some deployment tools that would alow you to create your own bootable disaster recovery cd... win2k3 has
ntbackup /ASR, Automated System Recovery which basically allows you to backup your full system to tape(unfortunately there is no way
to script it automatically), and if you have to recover the system from scratch, you boot the server with the win2k3 server cdrom
and press F2 and it wil use that full system baclup from tape to restore your system automatically..... obvioulsy hardware must be
the same.....

shockie B)

"John Goodwin" wrote in message om...
Hi, I'm looking for a backup solution that offers the following
benefits/features:

1) Backup entire hard drive to tape (currently 30GB HD of highly
compressable content, only about 8GB or so used so far)
2) Bootable restore CD which allows:
1) Partitioning
2) formatting a new hard drive if necessary
3) Restore of tape to hard disk

I am not really interested in imaging to another hard drive, and I'd
prefer to have it all go to tape directly.

If it's possible to re-use the boot CD, that'd be better, so I only
have to have a CD reader in the computer.

I've seen decent low end DLT drives go for a hundred or two, and the
tapes are about $6 or so used, and $40 new, so there's a big range to
play in there. However, with the fact that each tape would hold many
backups and be portable to an offsite location, it's very desirable
for me to have a tape, or other removable media.

Also, I plan on having some empty bays in the computer and storing the
tapes in there. The PC will be in an air conditioned dust free
environment, and if there's any reason I should take special
precautions if doing this, let me know.

This is for a SOHO server, and it has a mirrored array already, but I
need to also implement a backup in the event of data corruption or
serious failure.

Look forward to your recommendations,

John Goodwin