Should There Be A Tape Backup Drive in Your Future?
Hard drives are more reliable than ever, right? Well, yes and no. In many respects they are more reliable than those items we used just a few years ago, however, the basic flaws of spinning drives, heat, static electricity, and frictional wear are not removed. In an article of 2007, from Robin Harris on ZDNet states that even with the amazing figures for MTBF of current drives [pdf], 3% of them will fail in the first 3 years of service; after 3 years, the odds are that much higher for failure. In the words of Dirty Harry, “Well, punk, do you feel lucky?”
No one wants to be in that 3%.
Mr. Harris goes on to say that consumers should not be swayed by the slick sales pitches given for RAID solutions, because most of the time, the cost and trouble are not worthwhile.
While the benefits are there, at least mathematically, for the use of RAID, the working story is that there are too many ‘in the field’ problems with implementation. Things like not knowing which drive to replace because the failed drive was not clearly identified, problems with UREs, and other similar user errors (not simply relegated to the boneheaded) make the list of problems to be dealt with.
On his own website, Mr. Harris attempts to give the reader a quick education on the problems of drives, and what you think you might know is probably wrong.
The moral to his story is one we, of the old school, were pounded upon almost incessantly about – backup, early and often, and if you care about the data more than a little, do another copy for safety’s sake.
So, instead of that RAID controller, that software RAID driver, or some other nonsense that makes little sense when thought about critically, and with the proper figures in hand, perhaps a small tape backup unit would be the best insurance possible.
Floppies are a thing of the past, CDs and DVDs require a great deal of user intervention – which will tend to make said user put it off, so perhaps that large SATA or SCSI-based tape drive would be the best solution to data worry and possible loss. Sure, it is going to cost a bit more than 2 large hard drives, but each time you start the process and walk away, remember that convenience costs a bit.
Back when QIC tapes were the medium, and Colorado was a big name in drives, I used to do backups all the time, and it was easy. When I did have a catastrophic data failure, I was able to get a new drive, and restore in about two hours, with only a few files lost, as I had done some work since that last backup – but nonetheless, I lost less than a day’s work, rather than a few months.
Perhaps after reading the articles above, you might consider getting a tape drive, and if you tell two friends… well, maybe a new golden era of tape backup will surface.
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4 Comments
zenium
May 19th, 2009
at 8:45pm
Please tell me where I can get a 12 TB tape unit. I’ll be happy with just a 1 TB unit as long has it doesn’t cost as much as my all 5 of my current servers for a small 50 person organization.
And if you do have a multiple servers it means backing up to the tape drive host server and then another backup to the actual tape drive.
Now tape media also has a life span and can generate URE’s
A disk to disk to tape just has too many places where errors can occur: 1) network error transfering to the tape host unit, 2) disk error writing to the temporary storage, 3) tape error writing to tape.
I think I’ll stick with a good enterprise grade removable hard drive tray system. At least I can backup all my servers to the removable drive and I eliminate the tape media failure step.
the oracle
May 19th, 2009
at 9:56pm
zenium,
my mistake not stating several times that this was targeted to home user/small business, but I did use the word consumers, in the article, and if you had read any of the articles by Mr Cook, you would have seen that he stated that this was a concern for the home user/small business.
12TB is not a usual amount of data to be encountered by a home user or small business, and also you might want to refer to the articles, where the author states that with sizes of drives what they are getting to be, RAID 6 is the acceptable minimum, and soon that will be of little benefit. Something more fault tolerant will be necessary. The articles aren’t that long, and are very interesting – it sounds like you could benefit from the read (no disrespect intended)
George
May 20th, 2009
at 12:36am
“golden era of tape backup”…Well, the backups could be great, the recoveries would again be hell…
So, why not decide from the beginning to have the best from both worlds? Use disk arrays keeping in mind the disks WILL die, even build a plan to replace them once a year at least. Then install a friendly solution like BOS (www.bos.co.il) which in addition to performing scheduled automatic backups, can tell you everyday about the health of each drive so you can prevent the failure. The software will also report any abnormal activity filewise, contributing by this to your data security and surveillance. In fact, I’ve got so fond of this toy that I’m hardly keeping myself from using it to brew coffee…:-)
Seriously now, you could have a HD swap routine, but I agree that this is less recommended, to avoid the human error factor.
The disk drive prices have dropped in a way it is cheaper to use them in this proposed way, than going back to tapes, if you calculate not only the purchase of the removable cartridges, but also the man-time required to manage them (if you don’t have huge robotic equipment). Oh, and don’t forget the buck piles we used to spend in Data Recovery from those condemned rusty ribbons!
the oracle
May 20th, 2009
at 6:21am
George, your points are valid, but you missed mine, propbably because I did not state it clearly enough – this is for home user/small business.
You and zenium both have correctly identified what one would do in a bigger setting, but for the small setting, tape and backup is a very cost effective and time-sparing method.
Thanks for the comment.
BTW, if you missed it in the articles by Robin Harris, he recommends Drobo as a very good disk solution; I am not familiar with BOS – I’ll check it out.