Backup Software for Tape Drive

[bkdraft]

I just purchased a new Seagate Tapestor backup drive. What is the best & easiest backup software to use? I would appreciate any input good and bad.
Thanks,
bkdraft

 

[ojai00]

The options that you have are Veritas Backup Exec, Windows Backup, Dantz Retrospect, and Computer Associates ArcServe (Free trial). Windows Backup is free and comes with Windows 2000 (not sure about XP...but I think it does). It's not as powerful as the others but I think it does the job. The other programs are pretty expensive...so the choice is yours. There is a free trial download for ArcServe so you might want to check that out. Hope this helps.

 

[Staver]

Dantz Retrospect is an excellent product, and it will backup files that other products say are "busy" or "in use". It's downside is making sure your tapedrive is compatiable since it seems spotty even from popular manufacturers. It seems the newer a drive the less likely it is supported, since hardware qualification takes many months. There is another vendor called Tapeware. This software can backup or verify all your discs at the same time. It has an extreme number of options, so no person's setup may be exactly the same.

 

[bkdraft]

The tape drive came with Retrospect. It now turns out it was just temporary license and is asking me to purchase license by Nov 23. I have been using, or trying to use, it for last 3 weeks. It is very frustrating and I do not really have a good backup yet. I have want to backup Monday thru Friday. Monday's tape I first used on Backup B, but now I have changed the format and now using Backup D. The problem is on Monday it will not re-use the tape because it says its from set B. I have found no way to erase or ovewrite the tape. Also, I have the 20gig model which is suppose to backup 40 gigs with compression. The hard drive on the server is 18 gigs, however the first time I tried to do full backup it said the tape was full. Hmm. Next time I used compression and it fit this time, but, I set it to start at midnight and it took until 3:00 PM next day to finish. Then the next time it quit during the backup and said the tape drive was dirty. I have not had any good luck so far.
Any ideas and suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[ojai00]

Only certain tape drives have the ability to format a tape. Others just overwrite the media when the backup job is called up. Check to see if there's an option for that in the Options or Preferences. I think in your case, it's just appending to the end of the last backup. Are you running the tape drive on a SCSI controller? At work, the tape drive on the server is running on a PERC controller.

 

[bkdraft]

It is running on USB. I found one setting that I thought would allow it to overwrite, but it did not work.

 

[Staver]

My advice is go to the Retrospect conferences, and post your problem there with full details. I have been using Retrospect for years with 4 seperate backup tape sets. They start when they are scheduled and run as I want them to. You can always erase a tape using Configure then Devices. Highlight the tape then click on erase. I really can't make out your backup strategy with the information you have given. How many tapes do you have? How many weeks of retention do you want? What version are you using? If you can provide this info I may be able to guide you through it. Another thing is that the 40G rating via a 20G tape is only under the most ideal situation. I'd say real world capacity would be near 25G to 35G per tape.

 

[bkdraft]

OK, found out how to erase. I knew there must be someway to erase, but just could not find it. Thanks to Staver! I am erasing all the tapes and going to start over and try again. The tapes I have are 10/20 thus why it would not back up everything. Duh !! I am going to try and set up the script to back up just one folder, the one with all the data that I cant afford to loose, and backup every weekday night. I need it to run in the early morning while maybe there will be no one accessing the server. Thanks for all the help.

 

[bkdraft]

Update: Looks like everything run fine last night so I will see how it goes from here. Thanks for all the help from everyone.
James