What is the best device for archiving/backup of large graphics files from my workstation? I cannot put my files on my company's servers for the usual nightly network backup, so they have given me a DAT drive that they intend to install for my independent backup of my graphic files. How reliable is this drive? And will it be easy to restore if I need to? I am using a WinXP Pro Dell workstation and running all the usual graphics applications. No video files....yet. Opinions appreciated.
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Back-Up/Archiving Devices
- Thread starter Pixelchik
- Start date
DAT drives are normally OK, but you do need to remember that you are saving onto magnetic media (tape). This can easily be destroyed. You would probably be better off using an external HDD that could be taken off site. If you had two external HDD's, you could use one a day or week, depending on how often you backup.
- Thread starter
- #3
The DAT drive is very reliable and magnetic tape is the industry standard for archiving and backup. Depending on the backup software it can be very easy to use. Hard drives are fragile and they wear out, but are cheaper and more familiar.
I use a rotation of (3) USB drives that I swap weekly, one travels with me, another at home, one connected at the office. I do have a redundant RAID 1 array on the main storage machine. I would use tape but the drives are thou$and$ for the storage I need, 100GB. I use laptop hard drives in budget cases and asssemble them myself, and use SyncBackSE to keep the drives current. I also spin off some DVDs of old files that I want to archive and remove from the daily backup regimen.
About $100 per drive/enclosure, $25 for Syncback, you're set. But keep in mind it is a question of when and not if those drives will fail.
Tony
I use a rotation of (3) USB drives that I swap weekly, one travels with me, another at home, one connected at the office. I do have a redundant RAID 1 array on the main storage machine. I would use tape but the drives are thou$and$ for the storage I need, 100GB. I use laptop hard drives in budget cases and asssemble them myself, and use SyncBackSE to keep the drives current. I also spin off some DVDs of old files that I want to archive and remove from the daily backup regimen.
About $100 per drive/enclosure, $25 for Syncback, you're set. But keep in mind it is a question of when and not if those drives will fail.
Tony
- Thread starter
- #5
One thing you may find with a DAT drive is that when it comes to retrieving anything from a backup, it can take a while. Also backing up to tape does also take a long time I used to use a DAT drive on our server & found that was the case. The reason I no longer use one, is that the data that required backup started to exceed the 40gb limit & I was not on site to change the tape. As the data to be backed up couldn't be in use, this was an overnight job. However this ended up taking about 18 hours for a full backup.
Anyway the price of a new drive was out of the question, so I now use two external HDD's. Seems to work OK. I know HDD's can be fragile, but if you have two drives, you should have some sort of backup. You may loose something, but not everything. This is only as a precaution, as the document server is using a raid array.
Anyway the price of a new drive was out of the question, so I now use two external HDD's. Seems to work OK. I know HDD's can be fragile, but if you have two drives, you should have some sort of backup. You may loose something, but not everything. This is only as a precaution, as the document server is using a raid array.
- Moderator
- #7
Burn the files to DVD-R.
<shrug>
Just my 2¢
"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg
<shrug>
Just my 2¢
"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg
- Thread starter
- #8
- Moderator
- #9
DAT tapes are all right. DLT seem pretty good.
I back up to DLT tapes every day. I've had one tape break, and that's after about 3 years of use. I do daily backups, on a 4-week rotation. I'm backing up about 22GB, it takes about 3 hours.
Just my 2¢
"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg
I back up to DLT tapes every day. I've had one tape break, and that's after about 3 years of use. I do daily backups, on a 4-week rotation. I'm backing up about 22GB, it takes about 3 hours.
Just my 2¢
"In order to start solving a problem, one must first identify its owner." --Me
--Greg
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