Backups to disk (experience ?)

From: Len Philpot (len_at_philpot.org)
Date: 08/26/03 

Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 00:51:24 -0000

I'm looking for opinions, experience, etc., on the relative merits of
tape vs. disk backups in an enterprise environment.

Currently, we backup about 100 systems or so, a total of around
2TB/week, give or take. It's all to DLT7000 tape right now. We're not
looking to go to another media right away, but you gotta start
somewhere. Obviously, even if we backed up to disk, we'd still clone to
tape for offsite DR storage.

Our backup environment is Sun, if it matters, but we backup Unix,
Windows, Novell, etc. We'd like to stick to our current software (Sun's
rebranded Networker).

Like I mentioned above, we're not going to switch tomorrow, but are
there any major things to think about? Some that come to my mind are :

* Capacity flexibility of a disk farm (or arrays) vs. removable media
* How is fragmentation at the saveset level handled (not at the
  filesystem level)?
* I tend to think we'd probably be trading "problems for issues", e.g.,
  tape errors for design and implementation issues. Hopefully, media
  errors would be negligible with disks

Our retention needs (usually) are pretty short, on the manner of less
than two months.

Any opinions?

Thanks. 

-- 
-- Len Philpot                          ><>  --
-- len@philpot.org       http://philpot.org/ --
-- lphilpot01@yahoo.com  (alternate email)   --

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