Budget Backups: Which is better
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@ajstringham said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@g.jacobse typically your main options are:
- disk arrays (SAN, NAS, DAS, etc.)
- tape (LTO typically)
- cloud (Amazon S3, Rackspace, Azure, etc.)
Using USB and other manually removable drives can be used in special circumstances, but generally not. The big three really cover the bulk of the use cases because they are more automated, scaleable and reliable.
Yup. This.
Manually removable drives are in use now,.. and one is in recovery at only 20% image (been in the clean room since Oct 3rd).
I have some (OLD) tape equipment. but i feel that won't be enough - not to mention the age of the drive and tapes.
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Storage for backups is something you want to typically invest heavily in. Enterprise shops typically backup to disk, then to tape and then ship tape to offsite storage (e.g. IronMountain.) It's extremely costly at any scale. Backups are probably the most important cost center that a business can have. They aren't cool or flashy but they are where the money matters.
You don't need to go to IronMountain as a normal SMB, but you need to invest in your backups. This might mean getting a small NAS device like IOSafe that can sit on the far side of the building and backup to that. Even that leaves you at risk of building loss. But it is a start. Single drives are going to fail. Drives are not meant to be plugged and unplugged, moved around, etc. That makes them very likely to fail.
If you need to remove the device, look at tape. If you want it to be stationary, look at a disk array. But don't look at individual drives.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Storage for backups is something you want to typically invest heavily in. Enterprise shops typically backup to disk, then to tape and then ship tape to offsite storage (e.g. IronMountain.) It's extremely costly at any scale. Backups are probably the most important cost center that a business can have. They aren't cool or flashy but they are where the money matters.
You don't need to go to IronMountain as a normal SMB, but you need to invest in your backups. This might mean getting a small NAS device like IOSafe that can sit on the far side of the building and backup to that. Even that leaves you at risk of building loss. But it is a start. Single drives are going to fail. Drives are not meant to be plugged and unplugged, moved around, etc. That makes them very likely to fail.
If you need to remove the device, look at tape. If you want it to be stationary, look at a disk array. But don't look at individual drives.
Yeah, this shouldn't be a "I need to buy 2 or 4 HDDs". This should be looking at your total data size and planning accordingly. Scott's recommendation of a NAS that is stand-alone for backup is a great done. Disk is probably going to be your best option, as the cost isn't real high, and continues to go down, and the reliability is solid. If you want to save some money, use a NAS and use RAID1 with 4TB drives. A 2-bay NAS will give you 4TB, a 4-bay NAS could have 8TB with 2 RAID1 arrays.
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@ajstringham @scottalanmiller
In restructuring, I'll have a box that I can drop drives in.. I have a PE t310 that I could retask,.. but it only has 250GB drives in it and only one Controller. I can't say it would be worth upgrading it.
I thought about using the PE 1800 since it had a 72DAT drive,.. but I think it is to limited ... There does get to be a point where dragging something alone just isn't practical.
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IOSafe is nice because it is fire proof.
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@scottalanmiller said:
IOSafe is nice because it is fire proof.
Uhm,.. Yea,.. I've been watching those.. I've also thought of building my own... At least for myself at home.
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@g.jacobse said:
@scottalanmiller said:
IOSafe is nice because it is fire proof.
Uhm,.. Yea,.. I've been watching those.. I've also thought of building my own... At least for myself at home.
not sure how feasible that is to build yourself. It takes some engineering to make that able to be a working NAS, handle the heat, withstand the fire hose and survive reliably. The IOSafe device is impressive and yes, I have one.
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@JaredBusch said:
@ajstringham said:
It sounds like he's just doing maintenance backups, so I'd say yes, we need to get him a proper backup solution.
For what? Adding in something to specifically backup SQL is just another layer to make a mess.
He has (I assume nightly) full backup files being generated by SQL. Just back those up. Nothing else needs done. No messing with SQL and potentially breaking it.
Jared -...
Uhm...It's not being done... Ad hoc at best... the guy before me was using some copy program to external USB drives,.. Not really safe.
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@g.jacobse said:
Uhm...It's not being done... Ad hoc at best... the guy before me was using some copy program to external USB drives,.. Not really safe.
That is simple to remedy. Basic SQL maintenance jobs can auto create and cleanup backups. They will run nightly (or whatever schedule you want to set) and can be set to email you whenever they fail to execute.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Using USB and other manually removable drives can be used in special circumstances, but generally not.
Why not? I'm a big fan of 2.5" external USB hard drives. I prefer them to tape. I currently do a weekly backup of our daily backup to an external drive for off-site storage. Sure, there isn't enterprise levels of reliability compared with tapes perhaps, but I've had more issues recovering from tapes than I've ever had from disk. I backup around 1TB of data to disk in about 4 hours over USB 3.0.
For me they are cheap, portable and reliable. I'd never want to go back to tape.
I've also used 32gb USB stick drives to do a daily backup of our incremental backups (around 10GB of data), which also worked well, but I don't do that any more.
I'd highly recommend USB drives as a budget backup.
For budget backups of physical servers, what's your view on Windows Server Backup? I haven't used it for years, so wouldn't know, but it ticks the 'budget' box.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
For budget backups of physical servers, what's your view on Windows Server Backup? I haven't used it for years, so wouldn't know, but it ticks the 'budget' box.
I love Windows Server Backup to a USB HDD for physical servers. It simply works. I have restored from it more than once over the years.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
For me they are cheap, portable and reliable. I'd never want to go back to tape.
Portable and cheap but not reliable. They are not built to be moved around. The failure rate is very high. 2.5" drives are more reliable than 3.5" in this usage but are still fragile and being smaller means lower capacity and higher cost.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
For me they are cheap, portable and reliable. I'd never want to go back to tape.
Portable and cheap but not reliable. They are not built to be moved around. The failure rate is very high. 2.5" drives are more reliable than 3.5" in this usage but are still fragile and being smaller means lower capacity and higher cost.
OH how nice things will be once 1+ TB SSD are considered cheap.
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Define very high failure rate. I've been happy enough with reliability but haven't seen any industry figures.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Portable and cheap but not reliable. They are not built to be moved around. The failure rate is very high. 2.5" drives are more reliable than 3.5" in this usage but are still fragile and being smaller means lower capacity and higher cost.
Your opinion of failure rates in aggregate across many drives may very well be true, but that does not invalidate the use by individual people.
If you are checking that backups complete successfully, then this is going to be a failure caught as soon as it happens. You go drop $100 on a new one and you are done. Even for the person that has one fail, basic probability means they will not likely have it happen again any time soon.
Yes someone will always be the unlucky one that rolls snake eyes on the dice 5 times in a row. But that is the extremely rare case.
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@Dashrender 1TB SSDs aren't that expensive if you are considering them for backup. Even the mid-range ones run between 400-500$ then you just need a 2.5" drive case.
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@Dashrender yes, SSDs are far better for portable backup storage. Although 1TB is generally too small even for most SMBs today as mainline storage is so cheap that capacity tends to sprawl. But SSDs are super resilient, can take a shock and have a great shelf life while being able to go through environmental changes. Traditional hard drives are not supposed to spin down or take any temperature changes let alone experience external movement.
Although as SSDs get cheaper, the cost of WAN bandwidth continues to drop. It will increasingly be impractical to do backups to physical, transportable media at scales that SSD can handle. Already today on the good networks you can backup 1TB in 2.85 hours. Hard to justify the cost of buying many 1TB SSDs and taking the time to manually hook them up, unhook them, risk losing them or having them stolen or just risk people forgetting to do it (the fate of 90% of manual backup media systems) when less than three hours of overnight bandwidth will support a full automated, offsight, unattended backup system.
So while SSDs will solve a lot of problems they do so at a time where that usefulness will rapidly evaporate.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Already today on the good networks you can backup 1TB in 2.85 hours.
Please save me the math and time, what size pipe are you talking about? and at what cost?
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@JaredBusch said:
Your opinion of failure rates in aggregate across many drives may very well be true, but that does not invalidate the use by individual people.
If you are checking that backups complete successfully, then this is going to be a failure caught as soon as it happens.
Not in this case. Failure rates on portable drives can be vastly high. It depends on the case, but they will always be much higher than fixed drives and as high as near 100%. There is no potential for predicting failure rates for a specific situation other than that they cannot be anywhere close to the 3% per year failure rate of fixed, enterprise datacenter drives. Average failure rates on portable drives is probably closer to 30% or higher, but it all depends.
The problem with this system, though, is that failures cannot be detected until it is too late, because the drives are almost guaranteed to fail after the backup is complete, not during the backup process. It is when they are being transported and stored that they are likely to fail from motion and temperature changes or when they are fired back up when they heat up again.
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@JaredBusch said:
Even for the person that has one fail, basic probability means they will not likely have it happen again any time soon.
The chances of a second failure remain the same regardless of a first failure.
