Back that thang up
A web design shop like ours generates gigabytes of files every month, and traditional backup solutions just weren’t cutting it anymore. Six months ago, we adopted a new approach to backups and we’ve really enjoyed the freedom it gave us.
“Who put 2 gigs of files on the dev server?!”, Mike would yell from his office. Our VXAtape system used 20GB tapes that cost $30 each. Realistically, that works out to around 30GB of storage with compression. We could have upgraded to the next level of this tape technology, with tapes costing twice as much but doubling the storage. But, that also would have required a pricy new tape drive. That investment would only buy us maybe a year of growth anyway, before we started yearning for even more space.
After listening to Scott Bourne rave about Data Robotics’ Drobo, I looked into getting a couple for backup—but that’s not going to happen until Kevin & Alex buy that winning lottery ticket. That got Mike and I thinking about hard drives as backup, though, and it got Mike to break out the sacred Xeno Media credit card. The next day, we had a pair of 500GB hard drives ($120 each) and a USB hard drive dock. One drive was for even days, and the other for odd. A script on our main Linux server copied 65GB of data to the disk every night, and all we had to do was swap between even & odd while waiting for our morning coffee.
We ran like this for six months, and found it a fast, reliable way to back up all of our important records. Still, having only two drives meant we’d be without monthly and weekly backups. It also made offsite backups a pain, because who wants to carry a 3.5” hard drive back and forth to work?
The other day, a courier dropped off phase 2 of our cunning plan: sixteen portable USB hard drives—eight terabytes of storage in a small pile on Mike’s desk. Each drive enclosure is barely bigger than the 2.5” wide, 9.5mm high drive inside, and we treat these pocket-sized disks like tapes.
These drives cost three times as much as our old tapes, but hold twelve times as much. Their MTBF is measured in tens of thousands of hours, and they’re only getting an hour of use a day. They should be long obsolete before we start seeing problems.
