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View Full Version : Best "simple" tape backup software


IO540
1st Mar 2007, 17:26
I have been running DDS1/2/3/4 drives for about 12 years, on a win2000/NT4/XP network (workgroup) using Seagate Backup Exec v6.11 all that time. It works fine, despite the program being clumsy in various ways, so why change? The only problem was that BE6 could not backup many open files under win2000 (it did fine with NT4).

With storage need going up I have moved to a Quantum DLT-V4 drive and
the Sony 80GB-320GB tapes.

BE6 doesn't seem to work with this tape drive; it doesn't recognise it.

So I fished out a later version, Veritas Backup Exec v10 which I bought a while ago but never got around to using. This works OK but

(a) is a monstrously complicated program, with 100x more features than
I can use or understand, services all over the place...

(b) while it runs under a bare win2000 install it fails to run under the main one, due to the server service not starting. I see half of google is taken up with this very subject so I am not alone, but I see no obvious fix for it. It's obviously being caused by some other application etc which the bare win2k install doesn't have.

Question: is there another backup app, which is OK for a simple backup (including the win2k/XP O/S open files which even BE6 would not back up) and is more robust?

Ideally, it would be tape format compatible with BE6/BE10 but that may
be asking too much since I usually choose "software compression" over
"hardware compression". Anyway, I will always keep a means to read old
tapes, via a machine on the LAN somewhere...

A quick look reveals loads of backup programs of obviously varying quality, with Nova Backup looking highly recommended.

Any comments?

I always do a straight "file copy" backup, and manage the media hierarchy myself.

IO540
2nd Mar 2007, 09:58
Update: windows' own backup program seems to do all I need...and it works!

Saab Dastard
2nd Mar 2007, 16:38
I second the Win2K internal backup program. I haven't used any under XP.

I'm not sure of the ability to cope with open files, however.

SD

IO540
2nd Mar 2007, 19:09
Open files (as in the operating system) seem to get backed up fine.

Open files (open by an application, e.g. AV software) have been a persistent problem with tape backup apps. AV software sometimes keeps them open so that they cannot be messed with...

NTbackup (as I think it used to be called) is just a cut down version of the ancient Seagate / Veritas / Symantec / whatever-they-are-today Backup Executive program. It even used to be tape format compatible with the real $1000 thing. It probably still is - I will check a tape against BE10 tonight.

DLT is fast! 10-20 megabytes per second, and the PC hardly slows down during the backup. This is SCSI at its best - IDE or SATA doesn't even begin to compare. The verify process is about 30MB/sec.

Saab Dastard
2nd Mar 2007, 19:54
I recently had to look at some high-end tape drives.

LTO-Ultrium 3 seems to be about the fastest readily available - up to 80MB/sec native - and capacity (uncompressed) of 400GB per cartridge.

DLT seems pedestrian in comparison!

I am actually very fond of the DAT / DDS drives, because of the very small format. Capacities aren't too shabby either.

SD

IO540
2nd Mar 2007, 22:07
Well I did try to restore an ex-NTbackup DLT tape using Veritas BE10 and it sort of read it OK but I could not find a way to catalog the tape from BE10's 10,000 pulldown menus and options. What a total load of c**p this program is, done to justify the £1000+ (corporate version) price tag. I suppose if you need to backup live databases then you need a special tool for the job...

Re the other tape formats: I have no experience of the others you mention. An old friend, who goes back to the earliest days of Unix, has always spoken well of DLT and its superb backward compatibility. He can read tapes done 20 years ago. So I went for DLT. The drive wasn't that expensive either; £500 for a Quantum DLT-V4 which will do 80/160GB. The £28 Sony tapes which I use will do up to 320GB. Currently I am recording 120GB of data, most of which is not significantly compressible.

There are other tapes which are much faster but they haven't been around for long, so I would avoid them unless I needed something special. Remember that to feed 80MB/sec to the tape drive, you will need a drive array. No single HD is that fast, sustained.

I've been using DAT/DDS since about 1996 and while it's been pretty good, it's been far from 100% reliable. I lose perhaps 1 tape in every 10, due to weird errors. And these are HP or Sony tapes, nothing cheap. Once it records OK then it tends to be OK though.

The DDS drives don't last too long either; 2-3 years after doing a full tape once a week so perhaps 100 backups, which is not good for a £400 tape drive. The faults range from inability to correctly sense tape capacity (DDS1/2/3/4) to require permanent cleaning. The repair cost is so high it's never worth repairing.

It's really weird that after all these years, tape still rules. I recently thought that blue-ray DVD writers will take out a chunk of the low-capacity (DDS4) tape market and they might, but DVD reliability is the pits - no way one could rely on that medium for say 10 years. One tiny scratch...

obgraham
2nd Mar 2007, 23:03
For you tape drive users: what is the advantage of a tape backup, as opposed to, say, a flash drive or an external USB hard drive? Seems to me that way you don't need the tape transport to get at the data. What am I missing?

IO540
3rd Mar 2007, 12:32
For serious applications you need to keep a backup structure; e.g. one tape every night and these tapes are rotated, then every 7th one (say the Friday one) is taken out and placed into another rotating queue; then every last day of the month you take one out and place it into another rotating queue (that one will have 12 tapes in it), then you keep a tape of each year-end day, etc.

Various variously complicated backup schemes are used in different scenarios, the objective being that you can usually recover a tape from X days/weeks/months back but the further back you want to retrieve stuff from, the coarser the date resolution will be.

Obviously, the more recovery options you want the more tapes you need to have kicking around in your fireproof safe :) And the bigger a safe you need, and the safe will probably cost as much as the tapes inside it. Fireproof safes for computer media (max internal temp +50C after +1100C outside for an hour, or whatever, plus watertight) are expensive.

Backup to flash is OK for up to a few gigs. Today it's quite cheap - a 2GB SD card is £10 on Ebay. But you could use a DVD just the same way. A double sided DVD is 9GB and they are notoriously unreliable in terms of read/write compatibility v. different brands of DVD drives.

The problem is when you want to backup more than say 9GB. Then tape is the only option, unless you are happy with just one backup in which case you can use a removable (USB) hard drive, or some such.

The other issue is that modern operating systems (the hack called "windoze" especially) keep various files open all the time. These files cannot be accessed by other programs, so backup software needs to do various hacks to get at them. Usually this is done with a low level driver, and backup software comes with such hacks built-in. If these special files aren't backed up, then you cannot restore a whole PC HD from tape and have it working. Traditionally, only tape backup software had the facilities for getting at these files. A lot of s/w can backup to CD/DVD now but this side is not well sorted and there are various issues.

Then you get the really complex stuff like backing up live databases and this needs yet more specialised software.

So.... you come back to tape, whether you like it or not. Like HD, mag tape has outpaced everything else in terms of sheer storage capacity per £ and continues to do so.

You also need to think long term. You can google for backup software and you will get a hundred products. I bet you 90 of these will not be around 5 years from now, so your old backups will not be accessible (the media format is nonstandard) unless you maintain a suitable original PC running somewhere.

The above reasons is partly why the awful hack called Backup Executive is still around.

Keef
3rd Mar 2007, 13:18
I think it depends very much on what you are backing up.

Years ago, using Seagate Backup Exec (or whatever it was called), I went through the whole palaver with a cupboard full of tapes and a rota for which one got used and how long it was kept for. That took me ten minutes a day, and I felt comfortable. It was quite expensive for the hardware and tapes.

Then I had a HD crash, and found that the backup tape wouldn't restore the operating system in "usable" format anyway, so I had to reinstall all the software. I did, however, recover my personal data from the tapes.

So I stopped backing up the whole system, and just backed up my data files. That was fine, but still a mass of tapes. For the amount of data backed up, it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and a lot of effort.

When I bought my last-but-one PC, I consigned the previous PC to be a fileserver, with automatic backup of my data files over the LAN. That's a lot less effort (in fact, none, because it's automatic).

The tape drive is in the bottom of a drawer somewhere, together with some tapes. I've been giving away DAT tape cassettes for ages...

Really important stuff gets backed up again, onto a USB hard drive.

And since I started using HD to back up ... I haven't once needed to restore anything.

IO540
3rd Mar 2007, 17:41
Well yes it depends on whether you need to go back to some older version.

Often, in a business/professional context, you do something on a PC, and then you need to open the item again (say, a document, a PCB design, a schematic, a graphic design, etc) 5 or 10 years later. It may have got corrupted 3 years ago in a PC crash, and gradually the corrupted version has propagated onto all your backups.

That's why one has to have a backup strategy like I described. Then you go back and back until you get the uncorrupted version.

Same with accounting software, but for a diff reason. You may need to retrieve a particular year-end data set, in case of a Revenue enquiry/investigation/employee fraud/whatever. HMRC are b*stards these days; they can go back 6 years but if they find something 5 years back they can go back another 6 years and if you don't have the supporting data they can make an assessment and you have nothing to defend yourself with.

Obviously if everything you do is irrelevant the moment you do it, a USB hard drive etc will be just fine.

Saab Dastard
3rd Mar 2007, 21:34
The advantage of a backup rotation strategy - not necessarily to tape - is that you are NOT overwriting the only backup each time you make a backup.

As IO has already said, this allows you to retrieve earlier versions. And not just earlier versions, but versions prior to a virus infection, or a data corruption (that may have happened days or weeks earlier).

The other point about backup rotation strategy is the ability to store the media off-site.

Whether you now use tape or some other medium is less clear-cut now than in the days when disk was VVVVVVVVV expensive, and tapes were not!

Also bandwidth used to be expensive - now off-site backups can be done over the wire! Snap to disk locally, archive the snap copy to the offsite mirror and back it up to tape remotely.

The other thing I would like to point out is that DVD R and RW particularly, have a frighteningly short data retention life. I read yesterday (IT week) that after only 3 years, some of the data on a DVD-RW will be corrupted. DVD-RW should be seen as "volatile" storage!

SD

Keef
4th Mar 2007, 00:22
My backup "strategy" is very simple! The backup zips all my key stuff into a file with the date in its name. Those just sit on the fileserver's HD until I tidy up. I keep end-of-quarter for ever, end-of-month for three months, and so on. It's enough for me. For a large corporation , it would be no use at all.

Year-end accounts have their own filenames, and are stored on the two PC hard drives AND on floppies AND in printed form. Needless to say, I've never had to go back and use them.

The problem will come when I have a HD crash and can't find all the software to reinstall. So far, my CDROM filing system hasn't let me down.

IO540
4th Mar 2007, 07:39
One other issue with backups is whether incremental or "everything".

A lot of people do incremental, never realising that a restore will require ALL the media which the previous versions are on to be OK - unlikely. For most situations, backing up the complete data set (or the whole HD) is the only meaningful method.

And doing that over the internet is a problem if using ADSL. You can't backup gigabytes over ADSL.

It does suprise me that tape is still around, after all the talk of terabyte storage on molecules, accessed using lasers, etc. This has been just around the corner for about 20 years. I guess tape is cheap, big enough, and the need to break up the media for (a) the hierarchy and (b) offsite storage is what has kept tape in business.

Absolutely central to the situation is the fact that you cannot (in most cases) systematically verify that the data you are backing up right now is undamaged. That's why keeping old backups is essential.

At work, we backup the accounting software to another PC every day, to a zipfile, and these zipfiles end up on tape each weekend. So we get a daily backup without any tape involved - the only risk during that week is a fire which would take out everything since the w/e. Doing a daily backup would be a problem because the tapes would be used so heavily that many would fail.....

bladewashout
4th Mar 2007, 18:46
I have used tapes in the past but have settled on a new solution. We do have a well wired home, with cat5 to our detached garage.

We now use a 1Gb Buffalo Terastation Pro and backup to a file accessed via share, housed in the garage so it is physically removed from the computers.

The teratation has 750GB when configured as a raid array, appearing as a workgroup computer shared filesystem. You can get 2Gb versions giving 1.5Gb in Raid config.

Each machine backs itself up to a directory on the share. We keep 2 backup files - the first is recycled every week, and has daily incrementals. The second has a weekly incremental added to it and is never recycled until it gets too big, when we archive it to DVDs and start again.

You can obtain any file from history at weekly intervals, or any file in the last few days, and this is way more than the average need.

The downside is that despite having a gigabit ethernet interface, the terastation won't transfer more than about 700Mb/min, but as we do everything overnight, this isn't a massive issue.

The plus side is that the 1Gb terastation is about £450, never needs tapes and DVD-ROM archiving (for us) is only needed about every 6 months.

BW

IO540
4th Mar 2007, 21:07
If the power supply packs up and blows up the hard drives, you've lost the lot.

It's a good solution (and I use a 250GB NAS drive here similarly) but there's no free lunch.

bladewashout
5th Mar 2007, 06:32
Correct, but then you've only lost your backups, which are fairly easy to recreate.... you still have the originals!

BW

OzPax1
5th Mar 2007, 21:17
When it comes to back-up it's horses for courses. For light home use back up of your data to cd or other such media is usually enough. More serious use, and I'd go the USB attached storage route (there are ethernet versions around too). The Buffalo is damn good, getting one myself soon for use at home. Above that is tape back up and then above that again is a full NAS. By full NAS I mean something like a NetApp (http://www.netapp.com/) solution.
I work for an LEA in school IT support. Most of our school have at least a tape backup with a 5 day tape rotation. For MIS Data we offer (and most use) a remote backup solution to ours servers (NAS drives). The NAS drives are then backed up to a NetApp box which is itself backed up to another one 300 miles away. One of the schools tech's when he heard all that said to me..'well that is more then belt and braces!'. ;)

Bushfiva
6th Mar 2007, 05:49
I second the Terastation approach. I've got a couple of non-RAIDed drives hanging off the back of the Terastation, and back the Terastation up to them weekly. So I can survive a drive failure, and a system failure. Since drives are so cheap now, I've got a spare sitting there ready.

In my one and only ever power failure, the Terastation took 45 hours to sort itself out after restarting. So now I run the Terasation, backup drives and the switch off a little UPS: the Terastation only consumes something like 57W at full power, plus 50W for everything else. The Terastation does a graceful shutdown when the power goes out.

I was a long-time user of tapes until the first time I really did have a disaster, and needed to recover a system... after that, I went to hard disks :-)

In some markets, the Synology RAID unit is sold without drives. It's a nice, small, quiet unit, with or without.

bladewashout
6th Mar 2007, 13:26
Bushfiva, you've just given me a use for a 150Gb USB drive I have lying around!

We do have our mp3 music files on the terastation for everyone to see, and although they are replicated on my laptop, I had been concerned that if the station failed, recently ripped CDs which I hadn't picked up might be lost and have to be re-ripped.

If I back up the non-backup files to a USB drive, I have an extra level of support, I also like the UPS idea - I hadn't realised that the terastation could take that long to sort its act out, but 750GB of RAID would, I suppose, take a while! Next cheap UPS on ebay has my name on it...

BW

Bushfiva
7th Mar 2007, 03:21
BW,

The Terastation Pro's compatible with the "power bad" signal put out by UPSes by APC and Omron. The smallest UPS is all you need since a 350W unit could power the TS for 5 minutes, and you just need 1 minute: USB cable from the UPS to the Terastation, and the unit shuts down nicely when the power goes out. Or you could configure it to wait for the USP "battery low" signal, but I'm not brave enough to test that on a small UPS :}. UPS was less than $100. You need to check exactly which models work, there are exceptions.