Need Backup Software advice

[dvd_maniac]

Hi all,

As some of you may know, I compress all my recordings of my favorites and movies and DVDs into H.264 format. This is a timely process and I am looking to archive everything. Most things sit on my raid-5 array and others on regular HDDs. Around 2.8TBs all together.
About 2 weeks ago my array lost a drive and had to be rebuilt and took a couple of movies with it prompting me to buy an LTO1 drive. I went with the LTO1 because of it's longevity and also because I got 30 free 100/200GB tapes from work. But now I am looking for a good software package to run it on. I tried NovaBackup and do not particularly like it. Seems to mess with Explorer on my Win 2003 server whenever the service is running.

Any Ideas as far as good backup software?

[Dekard]

nt backup included with windows server 2003 is a really good solution...

[lovingHDTV]

I finally went with Retrospect. It works well and does support tape drives.

[dvd_maniac]

I tried built-in NT backup and found it to be too scaled down.
I will give Retrospect a try.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

About 2 weeks ago my array lost a drive and had to be rebuilt and took a couple of movies with it...

Maybe there's more to this story than you've told here, but if a single drive failure caused you to lose data, then your RAID5 array isn't doing its job. Nothing wrong with having another level of backup as well if that's what you want, but the RAID setup is your primary protection against data loss, and you should make sure it's working properly.

[Dekard]

yes... it does allow for the failure of one drive with no loss of data..

[stevech]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

Hi all,
About 2 weeks ago my [RAID5] array lost a drive and had to be rebuilt and took a couple of movies with it prompting me to buy an LTO1 drive.

Any Ideas as far as good backup software?

Speaking as one with faithful boot drive backups but worrying about no backup of the non-RAID disks I have for "archived" shows in Sage... I'm disheartened to hear that a RAID5 user lost files and that he's looking at using a tape drive.

I was nearing a decision to build up a RAID5 from 300GB SATAs.
Or chicken out and do mirrored drives

I went from Ghost to Acronis TruImage. I don't know for sure about tape - but it does allow you to state the removable media capacity so it would handle tapes as it does DVDs, I guess. I just create multi-gigabyte weekly drive images with it, and daily incrementals, all as files across the LAN to a server.

[mattdcknsn]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

About 2 weeks ago my array lost a drive and had to be rebuilt and took a couple of movies with it prompting me to buy an LTO1 drive. I went with the LTO1 because of it's longevity and also because I got 30 free 100/200GB tapes from work. But now I am looking for a good software package to run it on. I tried NovaBackup and do not particularly like it. Seems to mess with Explorer on my Win 2003 server whenever the service is running.

Any Ideas as far as good backup software?

My only suggestion is to not be too dependent on tapes for backup. If you need to restore anything past a couple of months its a crap shoot. Its good for temporary backups but not for long term. I would also invest in a good storage solution for the tapes, mostiure and temp changes tend to mess them up quicker.

[heffe2001]

We use Backup Exec on our Windows servers, and a product called Lone Tar on our linux server.

Of the 2 I'd definitely say Backup Exec is a lot better at what it does (and much easier to set up, and also has very good tape drive support).

[Menehune]

I stopped using tapes in '98 after having three traven tapes in a row go bad on me (at $25 ea?). Much easier (and much faster) in my case to just plug in a second 4GB HD and copy over the win 95 partition.

[dvd_maniac]

Wow, I am astonished to hear about a crap shoot.
I was told by countless people in IT that LTO is VERY secure for long term archiving. Much better then the commercail products found at stores and that is basically what all big businesses are using these days.
The people with tape issues concerning "LTO" please chime in here and set the record straight for me.