How about using Veritas Back-up Exec with dedicated hard drives?

[nextdoor]

Hello,

I'm new to this forum and fairly new to the Veritas Back-up Exec. We've been using this backup system with a tape drive for a while but have lots of problems. Not sure exactly what they are related to but our IT consultant says that either the tapes are too old or or the tape drive could be failing....

So we have been thinking about setting up Veritas to back up to a couple of different hard drives in separate locations (we have a few locations in a couple of towns, all part of the same network).

I love the idea of not having to change the tape all the time since most of us here are part-time and our schedules vary so it's kind of a logistics challenge as it is to ensure that someone is there to change tapes and make notes on whether the back-up worked or not the night before.

Also, we've been looking at those new sturdy external harddrives (some are even meant for backup and say that they can be taken offsite etc) so we could always keep a backup offsite for disaster recovery purposes.

But how feasible/practical would this be? Has any of you tried it? How has it worked for you? Any advantages/disadvantages to changing from tapes to harddrives?

I'd love to hear your comments on this! Thank you everyone!

 

[stevet3]

Well that way I look at it its contant moving part or a spinning hardrive so there is the possiblityr of failure. More so than tape. Although I have seen tape drives fail quite often. It a cheap solution but making sure you have backup exec onfigured correctly is the key.

For DR purposed it may be pratical since you could take the hardrive to any other location or server and use either NTBACKUp or backup exec to recover the data. The bad side - somebody could take off with the drives and restore your companys data. If you had tape and somebody stole a tape the chance of somebody having the same drive is not as great.

Other than that the best method is to setup backup exec to overwrite recycle media before scratch. Set the jobs to overwrite only and use the media sets to control how long you want ot retain the data on disk. If the server had a tape drive you can backup to disk then duplicate to tape and have redundant backup solution. I would not use the backup to disk solution backing up over a WAN

 

[Ztrek7]

It depends on how much data you have and how much network activity you have. I have two servers in two locations connected via 11mbs wireless. LocationA backups up 4 pc's tthrough the day using a raid5 hard drive solution and backup to disk, then, I have a duplicate media set job run to the locationB at night. Incrementals m-f, then full on sat, then full to locationb on sunday when no one is around. We have like 30 gb of audio on each of the 4 pc's, but since no one is working on sat or sun, it doesn't affect us. Must admit though, I have just started this solution, but so far, is working nicely. No tapes, sweet. Well, at least on those servers!

 

[Ztrek7]

BTW, on your jobs failing, make sure that you retension media before job. I had tapes fail like that, but retensioning seemed to fix the problem.