External Removable Sata Drive Based

[Aeridyne]

Ok, so here's the deal...

This is the backup scenario I have inherited...

1. 5 locations

2. Each uses a separate tape drive, 2 are DAT72, 1 is LTO (only one that doesn't make me scream), and 2 DLT VS160.

3. Each place has a two week rotation of tapes, that's 14 days that are in constant use, another bunch for month ends (11 sets for each office) and 1 more set for year end.

4. Backup Exec 11d is the software that is currently in use.

There are multiple weaknesses that I cannot stand with this, one is that backup exec isn't that great, 2 is that using tape really doesn't appeal to me whatsoever, I just can't see restoring an entire server using tape and it working without issue, not to mention making a server image using tape just sounds ludicrous and asking for failure. There is no option for a full server restore, only a portion of the data, and definitely no bare metal restores or universal restores or deduplication.


I want to implement a new backup strategy with the following requirements;

1. Must maintain daily offsite portability. ( I was thinking sata drives in a removable enclosure of some kind, but it's complicated, I'll explain below)

2. I must maintain the current rotation setup, 14 days constant, 11 month ends, and 1 year end. (I realize this is going to be a retarded amount of disks and I'm ok with that, which is why to make it less costly i figured on using something like 1TB regular Sata drives, it's the enclosure and software used and everything else that has me stumped)

3. There are basically two pieces of software that I am looking at, either an Acronis solution such as True Image Echo w/ Universal restore because I have used them extensively and been satisfied and understand how to use their products. Or Backup Exec 12 with System Restore. So whatever solution I go with, I would like it to work with these, unless someone has a better idea. I have already looked into Doubletake and it is prohibitively expensive.

4. I am trying to pull this project off for about 20k all together, which is why I chose to use cheap software and cheap drives, the benefit is pretty damn nice though, and a vast improvement over tape in my opinion.


So that's the idea here, and I know what I want to achieve. The biggest challenge is what enclosures or whatever to use. Maintaining ease of daily offsite ability makes it difficult. Ideally since I have computer challenged users in the other 4 offices maintaining my backups currently by simply physically changing the tapes daily, it would be fantastic if I could find an enclosure that had a button or something on it to "eject" the drive for a hot swap.

I don't know if anyone else is doing this but I think it's a pretty kick A$$ approach to having powerful fast disk to disk backups, good disaster recovery and a high level of protection with offsite data on the cheap. So let the ideas fly ladies and gentleman...

 

[Aeridyne]

wow... nothing?

 

[dunkster]

I was thinking sata drives in a removable enclosure of some kind

Regarding SATA drives as removable devices, I've been using a StarTech HSD100SATBK Trayless SATA Drive Bay. Being 'trayless' means that no drive carrier/tray is required. The bare drive is inserted into the trayless enclosure, using pass-through SATA signal and power receptacle.

You'd need a bay installed (installs in 5" drive bay) at each backup/clone physical station, but no hardware for drive-conversion.

Auto-eject would not be possible.

Hope this helps!

 

[Aeridyne]

Thanks for the idea Dunkster, that would be pretty awesome for my own setup at home

Unfortunately though, i need something that would have the drives in some sort of protective enclosure as they will be transported offsite daily by users that are fairly clueless on computers, hence why the eject button would be a definite nice thing to have.

 

[mooseracing]

At my work I am doing 1tb drives in enclosures with daily inc's and a monthly full. I take the drives offsite weekely. Data is pushed over e-sata and is hot swappable. Time will tell for relability, as I have only been doing this a year.

Currently we use Symantec 12, but we are slowly going to purchase Acronis, my only dislike is there support though.

 

[MerlinRML]

Check out the Dell RD1000 tape drive. It physically looks like a tape, has cartridges and eject buttons, but it really is a SATA laptop drive in an enclosure that fits in another enclosure.

There may be other vendors that sell or OEM this drive, but I'm only aware of Dell's product.

I'm going to point out that one of the biggest benefits of tape today tends to be the ability to travel reasonably well (as compared to disk). I'm not trying to second guess you, as you're the expert when it comes to your environment, but perhaps tape is a good fit for you?

 

[Aeridyne]

Mooseracing - Do you have any special sort of enclosure arrangement? Or are you just using regular run of the mill single drive esata type enclosures? Either way, how do you control the hot swap? I've never used esata yet... (i know it's shameful)

Merlin - I have been looking at the RD1000, there was one thing that really turned me off on it thought, and that was that it uses a USB interface, and I know that any files over 5 gb stand a fair chance at corruption over USB and anything over 15 gb not getting corrupted is about 50 50, I realized this flaw when I had almost all of my acronis images go to crap after copying them from one usb drive to another, MD5 hashes didn't match and the archives became corrupt and unusable. Another thing that turned me off on the RD1000 is that it uses 2.5 inch drives internally and I wasn't real keen on the longevity of those drives. However, the biggest drive available is a 500 gb, and I'm guessing logically that HAS to be a seagate in there, so maybe those cartridges wouldn't be so bad. But I intend on these things working for a bare minimum of 3 years and preferably longer. I like the idea of the RD1000 though, but I would be more comfortable if there was one that hooked up via Esata or something like that, I just don't trust USB.

Isn't there anything else like the RD1000? An external enclosure either network or Esata connectable that you can hot plug drives with inidividual enclosures into? seems like someone would have made something like this?

 

[MerlinRML]

The internal RD1000 is SATA connected, the external is USB attached.

 

[taltamir]

it would seem to me like the most logical scenario is to transfer the data via the internet from point A to point B. maybe via VPN or some other tunneling system.
Have an offsite fileserver and synch it to the local fileserver.

Forgetting tapes and definitely not having "non tech savvy" personnel run around with the precious data in drives/tapes/whatever.

You could also use ZFS for data integrity and either raid1 or raid6 (z2 for zfs) depending on your gb needs and budget.

 

[Aeridyne]

Merlin - I thought I had read somewhere that they offered an internal version. Unfortunately the servers in each location are 2U so I wouldn't have an available 5 inch bay for them, I thought about just routing the cable outside the case and making it external anyway, but I'm sure my boss would balk at that. The concept of the RD1000 is great, it does exactly what I am looking for, but the cost of the cartridges is prohibitively expensive, so I'm looking for something very similar to that but not so expensive, even something I might be able to piece together.

taltamir - The internet isn't much of an option we have a single t1 connection at each site out to the internet, they essentially connect together over a VPN crypto tunnel. I didn't think that pushing huge amounts of data over those was going to be a good thing.

I have looked at different solutions, and the only one that came close was one from Unitrends that uses a more efficient way of backing up so that less data moves over the line for a fair price, thus far it's the only solution that I think wouldn't have to push too much data across and would work for cross site replication. I'm a bit skeptical still though of pumping all that data across a T1 and relying on it later, another reason that my self contained approach for each office appealed to me. Simply syncing the files manually would be far too much bandwidth, it would have the pipe tied up way too much and wouldn't even get enough data there anyway imho, 300 gb of data could take a week.

That zfs file system looks really cool though even though I'll probably never use it, Solaris is beyond me at this point, I can barely lumber along in unix/linux. That and the idea is less a NAS device, I don't want a NAS device, that's not what I'm going for here.

 

[taltamir]

If you don't mind me asking... why are you using something as slow as t1? its downright ancient... 1.5mbps? is there no fios in your region?

 

[mooseracing]

Originally posted by: taltamir
If you don't mind me asking... why are you using something as slow as t1? its downright ancient... 1.5mbps? is there no fios in your region?

We just got off our business DSL line, we are running 2 differnt T1's, and now a business cable line of 30/3. We had to agree to a 3yr deal to get Comcast to do the construction. Even in big cities, they don't have high speed connections every where.

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
Mooseracing - Do you have any special sort of enclosure arrangement? Or are you just using regular run of the mill single drive esata type enclosures? Either way, how do you control the hot swap? I've never used esata yet... (i know it's shameful)

I am just using standard eSata/USB enclosures. I carry them in my laptop bag, then place them inside a foamed locked peilcan box at home.

I haven't found a better solution for us yet. I was running weekly fulls (150GBs), which ceemed to eat tapes quickly, along with daily diffs. I have now moved to monthly full's and daily inc's.

In the end a months worth of data for us is about 500-600GB. I couldn't try moving that to an internet backup solution, let alone the restore process for that.

And I was just informed that they want dailys for a month, weeklys for 6 months, and monthlys for a year.

For hot swap I picked up a dual port PCIe eSata card, for when I bring another disk in to update the backups or whatever purpose. When you are dealing with large amounts of data USB blows compared to eSata.

Also for the hot swap, windows didin't give me the option so I use a combo of hotswap.exe! and Unlocker.

 

[Aeridyne]

taltamir - i wish... we pay hundreds for our bonded T1s in each office every month, I'm not sure exactly how much, but I know it's over 3h and under 5h I think. It was the best we could get at the time about a year ago and the conversion to that was painful. I'm looking at another vendor for possible ethernet speed, but that's all beside the point, in this area bandwidth is expensive. And I think a full blown ethernet connection would be about the only thing with enough speed to pull something like that off, that's my opinion anyway be it misinformed, misguided or spot on.

mooseracing - yeah, i really don't understand how anyone would want to go with an internet based backup solution, what would you do for a bare metal restore, a crazy pxe boot kind of thing? I mean really? Then how long would it take to pull even 100 gb down? That vs. Pulling out a disk from the bank next door in your secure deposit box and running that at 50/mb a second with images that you yourself manage, I think I'll take the disk and a boot disk. Mind you I don't know squat about online backups so I'm sure there are things I am missing here and I'm not trying to bash anyone that uses them or whatever, I just like the comfort of knowing my backups are at my fingertips however I choose to create them.

Daily's for a month, so what software are you using anyway? You said that you do a full and then differentials, so since they want week end backups would you start doing week rotations and keep a full for the end of each week, or would you just keep that full and pair it with whatever differential at the time? I guess this is irrelevant to the topic but I'm just curious.

So you just have a basic Esata card and any old enclosure that you use I see. I agree that USB blows but from my viewpoint it is more because the data is easily corrupted than the speed. And a large USB to USB transfer is just asking for MD5s to not match.

I read a few things about hot swap on a normal system just today and I think if I understood correctly that unless the OS was installed with an ACHI driver windows won't give you the ability to do hot swap, which may be why you don't have that option. What is that hotswap program anyway? I've never heard of it? I imagine that all my servers would probably need it. I used unlocker too btw, haha.

Either way though, that solution doesn't really work for me either, like I said, the RD1000 is exactly the idea I am going for here, but it's too expensive, there has to be something else out there to achieve disk to disk backups and maintain easy portability...

 

[mooseracing]

Sorry if my backup schedule was confusing. We have switched to daily incrementals with monthly fulls. We orginally ran Daily diffs, with weekly fulls, but we were burning a 1TB a month-month and half.

We use DFSR to basically place everything on the backup server, and then use Symantec to backup the data and it's remote agent to grab exchange. When our budget frees up, I am working on trying to get Acronis. I have had great luck with their bare metal/image and universal restores(not as important in a Vista or Serv08 enviro) which apeal to me. Also it does all the normal backup stuff.


That hotswap!.exe program works great.

I haven't found a better solution either. Possibly a good nas would be nice, but I really don't want the network hammered for a couple hours every day.