Re: [BackupPC-users] Which tape drive hardware offers the best value?

[Les M. <le...@fu...>]

dan wrote:

> consider that using a removable hard disk might be a better option for you.
> you can put a drive in a hot-swap tray or even in a USB2 enclosure and get a
> few big 500+GB drives.  benefits are MUCH MUCH faster backups, MUCH faster
> restores, nearly infinite reuse or rotation or disks, variable capacity so
> you can get 120GB drives now and then when your data grows you can just get
> bigger drives and keep the other drives around for long term archival.

You can also use external USB or firewire drives and raid-mirror or 
image-copy your archive partition, then rotate offsite. I've been doing 
that for a few years with 250 gig drives, keeping an internal pair 
mirrored plus 3 that rotate.  It takes a couple of hours to raid-sync 
the 250 gig partition over firewire with everything running but not 
doing backups and I stop backuppc momentarily and unmount the partition 
before failing/removing the external disk from the raid. I also keep a 
laptop configured so I can mount the external disk and do restores 
quickly if anything should happen to the main server. With tape you'd 
need a matching drive ready for a disaster situation.

Now you can get much larger drives - for example, Costco has external 
Seagate 750 gig drives for $199 that include usb and firewire modules.

I'm in the process of building a new server with one of these:
http://www.startech.com/Product/ItemDetail.aspx?productid=SATABAY3BK&c=US 
to make stock internal drives swappable and get the slightly faster sata 
transfer speed.  If I had more time to experiment I might try zfs on 
opensolaris or bsd, but I'll probably go with the same scheme of a 
3-member mirror with 2 always present and the third rotated since I know 
it works and it is easy to use the removed disk on its own.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    le...@fu...