Backup strategy for your SAN ?

[Eric Hansen]

Neil wrote: “With LTOs, my observation is they’re not like hard drives. You need to have the software that wrote it, just to read them. So, a Bru backup, needs Bru to restore. Retrospect needs retrospect and so on. Windows Backup (its a software built in to Windows) seems to be common across Windows systems.”

you can look back through my post history in the various COW forums and see that i have talked a lot about SDLT and LTO based archive (not backup) systems. i personally don’t believe in backing up a RAID-5 array such as Xsan. that’s why its RAID-5. have a few spare drives around to hot-swap if a drive fails. i’ve never lost media on a RAID-5 because someone was always around to hot-swap when needed. be sure to show your staff how to do this procedure.

at a former facility, we used the SDLT-600a, an ethernet-based SDLT drive. it was slow, but it worked great for archiving projects and was accessible to all computers on the office network. it used FTP and all the employees knew how to use FTP. i had researched LTO options using BRU and Retrospect with an attached LTO4 drive, but what stopped me from getting it is that it wasnt as easy as FTP (everyone needs to know how to use this system and there were definitely a few people that would never be able to learn a Retrospect or BRU-based system), and it was only available on one computer. another thing that became a huge concern was whenever the SDLT drive went down, we would lose access to our entire archive. the few times the drive broke were very critical. i would only recommend a tape-based system if you can afford 2 decks to minimize downtime. that former facility ended up getting an LTO4 system for archiving their RED footage and its been working great for them. but i know that my counterpart over there is the only one that knows the system, and personally that would drive me mad. my goal has always been to make it as easy as possible for an editor to access old footage when needed as quickly and easily as possible.

i now recommend to my clients a bare hard drive based system, where you archive your projects to 3 different drives – 2 in-house and 1 out of house that you rotate on a regular basis. a tape library should be done in the same way. hard drives are extremely cheap and getting cheaper at a faster rate than tape. then get a hard drive bay like Bob suggested above. i have been using eSATA “toasters” at a few facilities and they have been awesome. you load 2 hard drives in the top like a toaster, copy what you need, and eject.

regarding the “30 year shelf life” that Bob pointed out, i’m sure its true. but you need to keep those old decks around. tape companies advance their technology by creating new tape systems. when hard drives advance, they usually keep the same interface. look at the last 20 years and compare the different tape formats against the different hard drive interfaces. its definitely easier to hook up an old hard drive than an old tape. but you have to remember that hard drives don’t have the shelf life, so i recommend to my clients that they test their drives every 6 months and replace them when needed. thats why there are 3.

i’ve been talking about archive and not backup. for backup, i recommend that you have daily backups for your computer’s boot drive, which in many cases contains all your current projects. i would go with a cloning system like Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac) because you can get back running right away. in my experience, i have never needed an incremental backup system because no one every says to me “hey, i need a file i accidentally deleted 3 weeks ago.” its always been “crap, my hard drive died and i have to print this tape today and make FedEx.”

as for the SAN, since its RAID-5, i wouldnt worry about backing it up regularly. its more important to create a workflow for dealing with your media before loading to the SAN, and archiving after the edit is done.

e

Eric Hansen, The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com

[Bob Herzan]

It all comes down to workflow and your budget on how best to protect your SAN. You can add a low cost NAS with RAID protection onto your network and push the data manualy, LTO4 with the appropriate cards and backup software is also a good way of doing it exspecialy if you want to keep your backup’s off site or need to share them with your clients. I tried to add a quick image to this response so hopefully it will show up. If not you can contact me and I will send you over some additional detail and can hook up up with some of our customers in your area that are doing this already.

Bob Herzan
Vice President of Sales
Rorke Data Inc
952-829-0300