The Attivo Blog

About a month ago, I encountered a dilemma while monitoring our Backup Exec software.  While our daily backup to network drive feature was humming along quite successfully, our weekly tape backup began to show repeated failures. It seemed to backup the first 60GB of our network drives and database successfully, then it would pause and ultimately fail.  I tried a few more tapes to make sure it wasn't a corruption issue, but it did not resolve the problem. Then I decided to shave a few GB off our backup policy, taking us under the 60GB threshold.  Drat. We had outgrown our taped backups. We toyed with the idea of buying bigger tapes, but that meant also updating our Tape Drive hardware itself, a significant investement that would no doubt become obsolete itself someday.  Or we could remotely backup to an offsite backup service, but this meant clogging our internet line mercilessly during backup times - and 60GB takes a very long time to transfer even over broadband. It was time to embrace a different option.  USB external drives were the answer. Not only are USB External Drives significantly more inexpensive than Tape drives, but they also have the unquestionable appeal of being able to be plugged into any computer/server - without any additional hardware to buy/install!  Additionally, the transfer rate both to and from the external drive over the USB 2.0 connection is at times more than 30x the rate of transfer we received over the old tapes.  30 hour backups on the tape systems were now taking just over an hour to complete! We purchased 2 500GB Iomega drives from http://www.tigerdirect.com for less than $100 each. They shipped in just a few days and within minutes of opening the box I had them programmed into Backup Exec to backup our entire network on a weekly basis.  They are about the same size and weight as the old tapes, but at 10x times the size they are useful for a variety of purposes beyond just backing up our system.  Now, every Monday our new routine consists of the following steps:

1. Unplug old USB drive.
2. Plug in new USB drive returned from the offsite location.
3. Return to the offsite location with the old USB drive.

There have been a whole lot of fires down here in Southern California recently, but with our new backup plan in place, we're no longer worried about losing our valuable data.