[Cialug] suggestions on HDD based backup

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Tim Champion <timchampion at gmail.com> wrote:
> We are planning on going to a hard drive based backup system at work. We are
> a non-profit on a tight budget (I can spend about $1500 on this total), so a
> enterprise level disk-to-disk system isn't feasible. The current plan is to
> scrap the 160GB DLT backup system, and back up to SATA desktop hard drives
> instead.   A 1TB hard drive is about $80 ($70 today at newegg by the way),
> so the cost per GB is pretty cheap. They would also not require a tape drive
> in the event of an actual disaster.  A SATA hard drive could go in just
> about any computer to start the recovery.
>
> Anyway, I'm trying to figure out what to use to be able to easily swap out
> the hard drives on a daily basis since we are on a 2 week rotation. I'm
> considering an external eSATA hard drive dock like this:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121046
> or one of the many 5.25 inch internal bays with caddies. The disadvantage
> there is buying 10 caddies on top of the drive bay. I also once found an
> internal 5.25 bay that didn't take caddies (just stick a bare drive in), but
> heck if I can find it now.
>
> I'm thinking about getting a few padded carrying cases to take the drives
> off site. and keep the anti-static bags the drives come in.
>
> Any suggestions, do's & don't's would be appreciated.
>

Plan for drive failure. Few are meant to be this portable.

I helped a non-profit set up a system w/ USB drives. It worked great.
Their data set was small enough that they could get the job done over
USB w/out problem.

We set it up so that a computer had enough internal disk space to do
the backup and then it did a sync to a USB drive. This was done over
night. Some time during the day a receptionist would unplug the drive
and replace it with the one she'd taken home previously.

The nice thing about the usb drives were that they were self contained.

The reasons there was a master backup computer was because it made
restores quicker and also because one of the server applications had a
narrow window for doing the backup.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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