Rethink Your Backup Storage Media

Written by Renato Cruz Sogueco

Monday, 01 December 2008 16:06

Still backup your data to tape? If so, consider the times a backup has failed or you actually prayed during an attempted restore. Bottom line, tapes suck. For the past several years, we've been using external hard drives with great success. Essentially, hard drives are just much more durable and reliable because they are made to be primary data stores. The moment someone figured out how to make them portable is the day IT shops should have switched out the tapes.

The only issue with external hard drives however is that they can be bulky and heavy. We take a backup drive home everyday so it's a minor inconvenience. However, this too has recently changed for the better.

Introducing the geekiest gift you can give your staff system admin this holiday season, the SATA dock with external eSATA, USB2.0 and Firewire ports from Vantec - about $50. With this device, you can shed the bulk from your external hard drive and start carrying around just the hard drive itself - I would guesstimate this rids you about 30 percent of bulk and weight.

To be compatible with the SATA dock, you'll need SATA or Serial ATA hard drives. These are very different from the older parallel hard drives. The photo shows the difference - the top is parallel and the bottom is SATA. You can pick up a 1 TB SATA hard drive at any computer store for about $130. It's probably cheaper online. Check out http://www.newegg.com. You can go smaller with the capacity for cheaper but why bother? The more mass space the better.

And, again, SATA hard drives are fast. Recall the snail's pace of tapes. Now, for you geeks out there, the SATA dock has a sustained transfer speed of 3Gs/second using the external SATA - eSATA port. You could still use the USB or Firewire but we're only taking 400Mbs/sec transfer speeds. So, if you organization typically has about 300 GBs up to 1 TB of data, we're talking several hours. SAF's total data is about 300 GB so it roughly is a two-hour transfer time using eSATA.

We do a daily backup like most IT shops. I take a 1 TB SATA hard drive home daily and secure copy the data on to a RAID5 array at my house (can we get even more geekier?). We have two backup plans. Data backups on MWF and the other Tues/Thurs. So at any given time, I have the two sets at my house only a few days old. These are continually overwritten as new data from fresh hard drives are taken home. We no longer archive on a weekly, monthly, etc. - more on this some other time.

Another cool gadget to complement this whole operation is the Griffin ExpressCARD/34 eSATA for laptops. So if the above scenario is not enough, I also backup the backup onto an external 1 TB drive in my locked office using my Mac Book Pro with the aforementioned ExpressCARD. The card is about $70.

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Comments

Sandra G

Great post! A few years ago I witnessed a giant hard drive crash and the tape backup didn't restore. ,000 later...most of the data was recovered. And, what do they use now? Tapes. Some will never learn but I hope your post spurs more folks to be more proactive about how they backup their data.

Monday 01 December 2008, 11:12

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