I must admit, even though I have disparaged DVD archive life (see CDs and DVDs longevity questioned) I still backup my work desktops/family computers to DVD and DVDdl disks. It’s cheap (on sale 100 DVDs cost about $30 and DVDdl ~2.5 that much) and it’s convenient (no need for additional software, outside storage fees, or additional drives). For offsite backups I take the monthly backups and store them in a safety deposit box.
But my partner (and wife) said “Your time is worth something, every time you have to swap DVDs you could be doing something else.” (… like helping around the house.)
She followed up by saying “Couldn’t you use something that was start it and forget it til it was done.”
Well this got me to thinking (as well as having multiple media errors in my latest DVDdl full backup), there’s got to be a better way.
The options for SOHO (small office/home office) Offsite backups look to be as follows: (from sexiest to least sexy)
- Cloud storage for backup – Mozy, Norton Backup, Gladinet, Nasuni, and no doubt many others can provide secure, cloud based backup of desktop, laptop data for Macs and Window systems. Some of these would require a separate VM or server to connect to the cloud while others would not. Using the cloud might require the office systems to be left on at nite but that would be a small price to pay to backup your data offsite. Benefits to cloud storage approaches are that it would get the backups offsite, could be automatically scheduled/scripted to take place off-hours and would require no (or minimal) user intervention to perform. Disadvantages to this approach is that the office systems would need to be left powered on, backup data is out of your control and bandwidth and storage fees would need to be paid.
- RDX devices – these are removable NFS accessed disk storage which can support from 40GB to 640GB per cartridge. The devices claim 30yr archive life, which should be fine for SOHO purposes. Cost of cartridges is probably RDX greatest issue BUT, unlike DVDs you can reuse RDX media if you want to. Benefits are that RDX would require minimal operator intervention for anything less than 640GB of backup data, backups would be faster (45MB/s), and the data would be under your control. Disadvantages are the cost of the media (640GB Imation RDX cartridge ~$310) and drives (?), data would not be encrypted unless encrypted at the host, and you would need to move the cartridge data offsite.
- LTO tape – To my knowledge there is only one vendor out there that makes an iSCSI LTO tape and that is my friends at Spectra Logic but they also make a SAS (6Gb/s) attached LTO-5 tape drive. It’s unclear which level of LTO technology is supported with the iSCSI drive but even one or two generations down would work for many SOHO shops. Benefits of LTO tape are minimal operator intervention, long archive life, enterprise class backup technology, faster backups and drive data encryption. Disadvantages are the cost of the media ($27-$30 for LTO-4 cartridges), drive costs(?), interface costs (if any) and the need to move the cartridges offsite. I like the iSCSI drive because all one would need is a iSCSI initiator software which can be had easily enough for most desktop systems.
- DAT tape – I thought these were dead but my good friend John Obeto informed me they are alive and well. DAT drives support USB 2.0, SAS or parallel SCSI interfaces. Although it’s unclear whether they have drivers for Mac OS/X, Windows shops could probably use them without problem. Benefits are similar to LTO tape above but not as fast and not as long a archive life. Disadvantages are cartridge cost (320GB DAT cartridge ~$37), drive costs (?) and one would have to move the media offsite.
- (Blu-ray, Blu-ray dl), DVD, or DVDdl – These are ok but their archive life is miserable (under 2yrs for DVDs at best, see post link above). Benefits are they’res very cheap to use, lowest cost removable media (100GB of data would take ~22 DVDs or 12 DVDdls which at $0.30/ DVD or $0.75 for DVDdl thats ~$6.60 to $9 per backup), and lowest cost drive (comes optional on most desktops today). Disadvantages are high operator intervention (to swap out disks), more complexity to keep track of each DVDs portion of the backup, more complex media storage (you have a lot more of it), it takes forever (burning 7.7GB to a DVDdl takes around an hour or ~2.1MB/sec.), data encryption would need to be done at the host, and one has to take the media offsite. I don’t have similar performance data for using Blu-ray for backups other than Blu-ray dl media costs about $11.50 each (50GB).
Please note this post only discusses Offsite backups. Many SOHOs do not provide offsite backup (risky??) and for online backups I use a spare disk drive attached to every office and family desktop.
Probably other alternatives exist for offsite backups, not the least of which is NAS data replication. I didn’t list this as most SOHO customers are unlikely to have a secondary location where they could host the replicated data copy and the cost of a 2nd NAS box would need to be added along with the bandwidth between the primary and secondary site. BUT for those sophisticated SOHO customers out there already using a NAS box for onsite shared storage maybe data replication might make sense. Deduplication backup appliances are another possibility but suffer similar disadvantages to NAS box replication and are even less likely to be already used by SOHO customers.
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Ok where to now. Given all this I M hoping to get a Blu-ray dl writer in my next iMac. Let’s see that would cut my DVDdl swaps down by ~3.2X for single layer and ~6.5X for dl Blu-ray. I could easily live with that until I quadrupled my data storage, again.
Although an iSCSI LTO-5 tape transport would make a real nice addition to the office…
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