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Backup Device Recommendations

Until recently, our daily backups have been handled by a Sony data drive on digital data tape via Retrospect software. We began having problems last month with messages of bad media, dirty heads, etc. so we used a cleaning tape, put new tapes in the rotation, and when that didn't work, bought another Sony backup drive (supposedly never used) at a discounted price, and we continue to have the same problems of not recognizing the media.

Perhaps there is a new improved method of backing up data that we not aware of. Any recommendations are much appreciated. Our local tech support suggested backing up to CD, but CD's can only be written twice, and then new ones used. Doesn't sound practical to me.

Thanks!

Carolyn Lorence, Director of Operations
Core Creative, Inc.

Carolyn, You may want to specify your platform - Mac or PC - and the OS. And whether you've recently upgraded, say from Tiger to Panther. Another good bit of info would be your capacity needs. This information will help focus your responses.

That said, I'm in a small, all Mac graphic design house and we backup to VXA via Retrospect. Our VXA-1 Drive has run near flawlessly for 4 years (which in technology life, is pretty good). And the new VXA-2 drives have double the capacity. You can check out the products here: http://www.exabyte.com/selector/index.cfm

The most problems we've had were with Retrospect at the OSX changeover. Before you spend any more money, you may want to check the Retrospect site and forums for updates. There are also sometimes hardware driver updates or even firmware updates for the drive itself. Do this especially if you've upgraded your OS or any other related software recently.

If all that fails, I do recommend Exebyte. They've been around for years.

BTW, we "archive" our jobs on CD, and so have an organized library by Client onsite. The tapes backups are more for the whole studio. On top of that I copy The C&P database once a week onto CD and take that offsite.

Good luck with this!

Ann Marie, Financial Coordinator, Ph.D

I used to use tapes as well. Now I'm using external hard drives. The tapes weren't big enough for all our data and didn't last as long as these hard drives. They're bigger and need a case to be carried in, but they work great. I think they run a couple hundred bucks apiece.

Jenny Hartman, Controller/Business Manager, R/P Marketing Public Relations

We have installed LaCie firewire drives. We purchased two of them a rotate them everyday.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=3D10571

The system has worked great for almost two years now.

Rob Holmbeck
Lanphier Associates

If you can afford the investment of a big NAS device, Disk-to-Disk backups are much faster to both backup, and recover. The only downside, is that you don't get offsite storage. If you want to implement offsite storage, you can set up a Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape backup solution.

Googling for Disk-to-Disk might be your best way to dig through the information on this. The major downside - depending on how much data you have, Disk-to-Disk backups can cost a lot to implement. If you don't have all that much data, then you could, in theory, just use an external USB hard drive.

ALSO... You might want to look in to a third party solution. It's basically disk-to-disk backup over the internet to a vendor that specializes in backup and recovery solutions. Once again, Google is probably your best resource.

Best,

david brunelle
network administrator * radarworks

I keep a daily backup on my hard drive & weekly I backup using a CD. This means that I use a new CD once a week. However, since they only cost around $.30 each, it's well worth the money spent.

Angie Albanese
Bandy Carroll Hellige Advertising

We had the exact same problems. Our solution was to use a read/write DVD burner with Retrospect with all new volumes going forward. That way we could continue to back up in the same manner that we always have and the cost was very little.

But, because the old Data Tapes were unstable we opted to slowly retrieve them and rebuild them onto DVD. We have been doing this in the background since last December (we have 10+ years worth). While this has been a slow process, we found that once we rebuilt the first few most recent volumes we got most everything that we use frequently.

Hope this is helpful,

Tien Barnett
Senior Director, Creative Services
Concentre Communications, Inc

I don't get it. Backup to another hard disk? Why move from one volatile media to another? Tape is far more reliable, which is the general idea when dealing with redundancy. Also, read and follow ALL maintenance procedures when dealing with magnetic tape drives.

Here is my choice for a solid tape backup platform - http://www.exabyte.com/ Quite a few advancements over AIT. The site is VERY comprehensive regarding VXA technology.

Pick a unit you can grow into and sleep MUCH better at night.

-- Dave Braford
Information Technology
Hanon McKendry Advertising

Round and round the back-up question. Well there is some good/practical - relatively low cost solutions that are fast and efficient.

The end result that we are trying to achieve is the justification for the large purchase of an X-Serve with Raid, but the solution is closer and cheaper as you work towards that illustrious solution.

You can pick up a 250 - 500 gig LaCie hard drive today for about $250 Canadian. Eventually using Apple's BUILT IN RAID management architecture one is supposed to be able to develop a raid back-up using these external drives. We are now backing up to a 250 gig drive with the intent to add a second very soon. Obviously, they need to be carried around for off site storage, but we are working with a firm to coordinate a swap system to get the drive synchronized so that we always have all files stored off site and a copy on site.

Overall, once we are all done we believe that we will have 2 Terabytes of storage in a RAID configured system for just under $5,000. Currently we are at the $500 investment level. Apple has some good information about this on their site on the XServe solution.

Pete Gabany
Limelight Advertising & Design
"Voicing our clients' vision With persuasive truth"

Ann Marie,

The C&P database is housed on a G3 Mac running OS9, and has been stable until now. We keep the C&P database separate from our OSX server where we house and archive our client files. Our staff are on both XP pcs (account service) and Macs (creatives). We are a small 20-person agency, and our database is fairly small, as well, at 350 mb.

Thanks for all the recommendations. I will follow up with all of them. If you have any other advise based on the above information, I welcome it.

Regards,

Carolyn Lorence
Director of Operations
Core Creative, Inc.