How do you back up a Terabyte?

[thiggins]

Some of you really do manage to fill a Terabyte of storage. What approach do you take to backing it up?

 

[Madwand]

1 TB is really easy to back up these days -- just get a 1 TB drive, pop it into an external enclosure, and transfer your stuff.

It's when you get beyond that these days that you need something a bit more sophisticated. I personally use a second server with a RAID 5 array, which is off most of the time.

 

[mcquiggd]

Agreed that 1TB is easy to backup, but...

The problem comes when you need a decent, automated back up strategy - with offsite storage.

Currently we have around 5 TB of data at my company, and we perform Disk-to-Disk weekly backups and incrementals. 'Online' backup simply isn't going to work

Ultrium Tape Drives are able to cope fairly well with this capacity, but expensive... at the moment we rotate TB scale disks out to a remote office. It's not 'neat', but serves it's purpose - for the moment...

Interesting discussion point, I hope people add their comments / experiences...

 

[Tamarin]

I don't have clients in the terabyte range yet, so I haven't had to cross that boundary. The current solution is a nightly backup to a 500 or 750 gig drive, that's worked well so far. The drives are rotated so their off-site backup is never more than a week old.... when they remember to move them. Maybe I should write some program to make a horrible noise on Fridays to remind them....

Tam

 

[bartoc]

http://www.adsm.org/forum/index.php

You'll find most of the answers to your questions in that forum.

It's oriented towards Tivoli Storage Manager and some of its competitors. That's the kind of software that manages TB range backup with off-site replication.

Costly and complex though.

 

[thiggins]

You'll find most of the answers to your questions in that forum.

Sorry, which forum?

 

[bombay]

Sorry, which forum?

He probably meant www.adsm.org

At work I designed a system and implemented TSM to back up around 500 clients (well over 1TB of nightly deltas).

At home, I'm still in the process of building my ESX monster, which will also act as a backup server. I'm thinking bacula or BackupPC.