Back-up solutions

[Colorblind]

Hi everybody, I've been asked to evaluate different back-up solutions to archive our designer's projects (application files, fonts, vectors, intermediate and final images and so on). We're currently archiving directly on DVDs without any software-driven catalogue system or back-up software. Any feed-back on solutions you currently use or suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

Edited by: Colorblind on Apr 4, 2008 10:44 AM

[jbbbarr]

Toast on mac should work just fine for you needs, and it does have the catalog option. If anything a dvd jukebox with this would be very nice.

[Point918]

Hey Colorblind;

In the past I haved used Retrospect on the Mac and DLT hardware to archive and retrieve jobs. It was solid but the interface, searching and restore speed left much to be desired. Additionally rumors of the demise of Retrospect's future development on the Mac swirl.

With the downward trend in hard drive space price it makes no sense to me to use anything else. Add a terrrabyte disks or two, treat it as nearline rather than online storage - spin them up only when you need to read or write. Use the OS to search for files or a good file/folder structure. Your volume may preclude this suggestion.

Of course you'll need to backup these disks using your current backup system as it's not if but when they will fail. A NAS or RAID system with hot swapable redundancy would work as well.

Currently we are using a file server with so much storage I foresee it being replaced before we run out of space. So in essence we don't archive - just make sure we have good backups.

Don Evans

[mattbeals]

As a technology DLT, and SDLT, is basically at its End Of Life. LTO would be a much better format to move to or start with. LTO's road map takes it to extremely large capacities for un/compressed storage as well as a data throughput. LTO 2/3 drives can be found for relatively low prices. LTO4 will be a bit pricey. One attractive feature of LTO, and some other tape formats, is that an LTO 1,2 or 3 tape can be read in all future iterations of LTO. I'm not sure that DLT and SDLT function in the same way. I tend to think it does, but I don't know for sure.

[stargate]

How about TimeMachine system? I am not saying that you should get TimeCapsule because it's only 1TB but you can have a Mac Mini with external drives that backs up your workstations or server volumes over GB network?

And if you are must use tapes...

I suggest VXA technology (much more cost efficient than any flavor of LTO) with BRU or Retrospect.

[Whitaker]

As John states, Toast comes with software called DiscCatalog, which is real generic, but we use it to catalog all our DVDs and it works great. We make 2 DVDs so that we can take one disk off site as an off-site backup, but we honestly haven't had a need for the second disk, your call on that one. We actually still use Findit for our OS9 files. Findit was a free program from Iomega that came on their ZIP disks, work great too.

Good luck!

[vniehaus]

I took our old 550 Megahertz Intel machine and installed Fedora 7 with about 500 gigs of hard drive space using the LVM partitioning. I then have a script that was provided to me by a fellow forum member that uses the unix command rsync. Just had to customize the directory paths in the script. This script is ran by cron on OS X and gives me email notifications. I also use Netatalk to mount the backup server's share to my OS X box.

The script works awesomely and solved my problem of manually keeping 150 gig's backed up. I then compress the backups with the Fedora box. Still trying to figure out how to automate splitting the backups into DVD's but at least I have a working copy on another machine at all times and have showed my management the productivity potential of OpenSource software.

Before that I was looking into Backuppc but since I don't have to worry about backing up windows shares I blew that off. Still interested though.

The old Intel Machine Runs like a champ with Linux installed and gives me more uses than just a backup server.

[jbbbarr]

Hey Vincent, this sure sounds like a ChasD solution !

[vniehaus]

Right You Are!

[Colorblind]

Thank you guys, these are all great suggestions.