4 ms·

My first and only experience with tape backups was in 2014 working with the BBB of Chicago. They were using tape backups, and there I learned that almost no com

by glasss 4y ago

My first and only experience with tape backups was in 2014 working with the BBB of Chicago. They were using tape backups, and there I learned that almost no company that small should be using tapes. Unless you have one or two people dedicated to handling that plus whatever other backup solutions you have in place, it won't end well.

robohoe 4y ago
I hear you. I had to manage a Quantum LTO4 tape library with Bacula back in early 2010s at a small company. Yeah that was a fun experience (not) and I'm glad I don't have to deal with them. Good riddance. Just getting the labeling right and making sure that the tapes were writable was a pain.
- guenthert 4y ago
  But that is Bacula fault isn't it? I used it myself @home and couldn't help thinking that there must be a better way. At work Commvault was used iirc, but others were in charge of that. I evaluated Tivoli SM, but that's more than 15 years ago and I barely remember. TSM and Bacula share some concepts, but the latter appears quite hackish. Not that confidence inspiring.
jedberg 4y ago
Interesting. I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier. The last time I dealt with tapes was in the 1990s, and it was dead simple. We used tape backups at a company with only 150 people. I was the most junior admin so I had to be the tape monkey, but it was easy. Just run backups regularly, change the tape every couple of days and label it, ship a stack to the offsite storage and request the old stack back, and then do a test restore each time a stack came back. The whole thing took maybe two hours a week.
- glasss 4y ago
  Everything else was definitely easier by comparison, but the situation was more about the one internal guy responsible for it was also doing all of the normal IT dept functions, so being the tape monkey was at the bottom of the list - for better or worse. When you're juggling 12 plates, a couple are gonna fall.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  > I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier. Everything else got easier, bigger, and faster. Two decades back, you needed tape to cost effectively back up hundreds of gigabytes. These days, pretty much unless you have a spare room with an automatic tape library (robots moving tapes), you're too small for tape to make sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library
ghshephard 4y ago
Agreed you need someone dedicated a minimum 1/2 to full headcount to run a backup tape backup system - particularly the first six months when you are getting all your routines in place (if can drop down to a minimum 8-10 hour/week time commitment once things are running smoothly - but obvious can scale up to many many headcount if you have a lot of data and a lot of systems being backed up). You purchase a Tape Library with sufficient drives / slots to support your data volume, you decide on tape software, you set up a pickup schedule with Iron Mountain or whoever will pick up (and return) your tapes, set up up your schedule of fulls / diffs rotation. There are three tricky and time consuming elements that require a lot of knowledge and dedicated time - #1 making sure you have a consistent snapshot and backup of the snapshots and RESTORE process for all your systems. Someone needs to test/verify roughly quarterly test restores (very time consuming and annoying but critical). And, the one thing that very few people do, but is also important - doing a “Black Start” - in which your primary backup site (with the robot, and software, and systems) are lost and you have to bootstrap, from scratch everything. So, yeah - virtual tape library, while obviously having downsides, is massively useful for a small enterprise.

by glasss 4y ago

robohoe 4y ago

I hear you. I had to manage a Quantum LTO4 tape library with Bacula back in early 2010s at a small company. Yeah that was a fun experience (not) and I'm glad I don't have to deal with them. Good riddance. Just getting the labeling right and making sure that the tapes were writable was a pain.

guenthert 4y ago
But that is Bacula fault isn't it? I used it myself @home and couldn't help thinking that there must be a better way. At work Commvault was used iirc, but others were in charge of that. I evaluated Tivoli SM, but that's more than 15 years ago and I barely remember. TSM and Bacula share some concepts, but the latter appears quite hackish. Not that confidence inspiring.

jedberg 4y ago

Interesting. I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier. The last time I dealt with tapes was in the 1990s, and it was dead simple. We used tape backups at a company with only 150 people. I was the most junior admin so I had to be the tape monkey, but it was easy. Just run backups regularly, change the tape every couple of days and label it, ship a stack to the offsite storage and request the old stack back, and then do a test restore each time a stack came back. The whole thing took maybe two hours a week.

glasss 4y ago
Everything else was definitely easier by comparison, but the situation was more about the one internal guy responsible for it was also doing all of the normal IT dept functions, so being the tape monkey was at the bottom of the list - for better or worse. When you're juggling 12 plates, a couple are gonna fall.
yencabulator 4y ago
> I wonder if tapes got more complicated or if everything else just got easier. Everything else got easier, bigger, and faster. Two decades back, you needed tape to cost effectively back up hundreds of gigabytes. These days, pretty much unless you have a spare room with an automatic tape library (robots moving tapes), you're too small for tape to make sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_drive#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library

ghshephard 4y ago

Agreed you need someone dedicated a minimum 1/2 to full headcount to run a backup tape backup system - particularly the first six months when you are getting all your routines in place (if can drop down to a minimum 8-10 hour/week time commitment once things are running smoothly - but obvious can scale up to many many headcount if you have a lot of data and a lot of systems being backed up). You purchase a Tape Library with sufficient drives / slots to support your data volume, you decide on tape software, you set up a pickup schedule with Iron Mountain or whoever will pick up (and return) your tapes, set up up your schedule of fulls / diffs rotation. There are three tricky and time consuming elements that require a lot of knowledge and dedicated time - #1 making sure you have a consistent snapshot and backup of the snapshots and RESTORE process for all your systems. Someone needs to test/verify roughly quarterly test restores (very time consuming and annoying but critical). And, the one thing that very few people do, but is also important - doing a “Black Start” - in which your primary backup site (with the robot, and software, and systems) are lost and you have to bootstrap, from scratch everything. So, yeah - virtual tape library, while obviously having downsides, is massively useful for a small enterprise.