Looking for tape bu recommendations

[Fiveohhh]

After a close call today, talked with the owner and we're going to get some sort of tape drive storage for off site BU. need to BU about 20-30gbs. I need some recommendations on some decent drives. will be backing up over night, so as long as it can BU 30 gigs in 14 hrs should be fine. was kinda looking, but there seem to be multiple kinds of tapes. any recommendations would be awesome budgets about 5-700. also All the files are in one folder(in their respective subfolders) on one pc. right now we have mirrored drives, but looking or some more redundancy.

Also what advantages does a tape BU have over An external HD. Say with the $500 10 or so 40 gig drives and rotate them out once a week. any advantages/disadvantages to this setup?

 

[Markfw]

With your budget, I would recommend my current solution. Get a good DLT 7000 solution on ebay for $300-$500, and spend the rest on a SCSI card (any good 160 controller $38 or more will probably do) and TAPES. 20 gig/hour on my system, so forget overnight..... Don't need it

 

[Fiveohhh]

Just got daone talking some more seems were gonna do an onsite NAS backup solution for daily and a tape drive for off site weekly. could you some more recommendations for both.
Thanks

 

[l7s4]

Fiveohhh...a couple of comments on backing up. Some bu programs will not back up files that are being held open..ie someone is
still logged on and running the program from a workstation. On relational db's, its not an individual file that you'll miss, but all the
db's held open.
Then the number of datasets need to be increased..you need a daily, weekly and monthly. Both weekly and monthly are offsite
sets stored in different locations ..weekly at home; monthly goes to the bank vault.
You also need to have a test file..notepad doc to test with. Make this part of yr bu set..del from the system and restore it to test
validity of the bu. Ocassionally, restoring a whole program with data is not a bad idea.
You also need to distinguish bw whole system and data bu. Whole system is used to completely bu the server..windows and
everything. Data bu only backs the critical data. If you lose the server, you need to reinstall windows and all the programs and
then restore the data.
It is not unusual to have to go back several tape sets to recover all the data. That's why the more redundancy you have, the
better the chance of a successful recovery are. Last month i helped a tech restore the program and data for the app I support.
We went back to the October dataset and only had a partial recovery. This was due to users not logging out of the program
and holding db's open during the bu. Of course, the most important db was not being backed up.
Good luck, Paul

 

[Dogma420]

would recommend a standard 20/40 or 40/80 backup solution, can just be ide...but it will cost more than 700.

 

[Fiveohhh]

thanks for the info so far. alot of the files are just storage and there a few DB's, so might have the owner do the weekly BU manually to make sure they're not being accessed. Just trying to find a decent tape drive now thats not gonna blow our budget. any decent sites that kinda give ya a good go around on BU solutions?