Small business backups solutions?

[Alex Hewitt]

On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 11:09 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:
> On Feb 5, 2008 10:35 AM, Kenny Lussier <klussier at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>   You can get a LTO-4 drive from Dell for $3200.  400 GB native
> >> (uncompressed) capacity.  Tapes are around $110 ($0.275/GB).
> >
> > Um.... I LTO4 is supposed todo 800GB uncompressed.
> 
>   Oh, you're right.  I had just checked quickly, and the page said
> "800 GB" with a footnote.  I just assumed they were doing the typical
> marketing thing (i.e., lying), and cut the number in half.  Turns out
> they were being honest; the footnote is about "1 GB = 10^9".  Color me
> surprised.  Sorry for the bad information.
> 
>   So that means $0.138/GB.  So tape is still cheaper than disk.  (For
> the media.  Factor in the tape drive... not so much.)

It's been my experience that these tape drives (and I'm not necessarily
talking about this specific model) last about 3 years or so. At that
point you either need to buy a replacement or have the thing refurbished
which seems to cost about half price. Not only that but you really need
to pay attention to the tapes malfunctioning because these guys are
usually set up with minimal user intervention. Customers typically are
clueless that their tape systems are starting to fall apart and it can
be going on for a while before the IT staff is notified or trips over a
log that indicates problems are cropping up.

-Alex

> 
> >> With 750 GB disks going for $160 ($0.213/GB)
> > > even with the cost of the enclosure.  And eSATA can be pretty darn
> > > fast.  And then you just need "rsync" or even "cp" instead of tar.
> >
> > You can get 1TB drives (SATA) for around $250.
> 
>   Right, but that's $0.25/GB.  Smaller disks are cheaper, unless your
> data set is only just over 750 GB and not expected to grow.
> 
> -- Ben
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/