onbar
Christopher Stefanick
many tape drives I need. They are both very small, about 1GB a piece, and
should easily fit on the 4 GB dat drive I have. Of course I'm going to want
the logs backed up too. I'm using onbar so that the whole thing is
automated. How many tape drives do I need? Is onbar smart enough to be
able to put system backups and logs on the same tape? If so, I could easily
get by with 2 tape drives and possibly one. If not, I'll need at least 4 to
avoid having to swap tapes daily. At that point, a juke box might be the
way to go. Any suggestions?
Doug Agnew
OnBar 'smarts' is not the issue. The real question is which storage manager
you are using.
Basically, I think any storage manager would be able to stack both database
backups on one DAT tape. I would vote for using the other DAT tape drive
for logs. I would NOT ever want to put the logs and database backups on the
same tape. If you do, and the latest backup contains some logs and the
database requires a restore, you would be "sc***ed, glued and tattooed" if
that tape is bad.
Put the logs on a separate tape, at all costs, and then you can restore from
ANY backup version as long as the log tapes are good.
I'd also vote for swapping tapes daily.... If you're not going to take that
backup away to CYA in case of site problems, why take the backup? And
putting two versions of a database backup on the same tape renders the first
one meaningless. You can process it, but the only time you would need it
would be if the second backup on the tape couldn't be read (as in media
error), in which case you probably can't read the first backup either.
Better to spend a few (maybe 10 minutes) a day doing a few routine steps and
spending a few dollars more on tapes than having to spend days trying to
figure out where you're going to get all that data to be re-entered.....
There's inexpensive, and then there's cheap.
Been there, seen that, wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
HTH,
Doug
"Christopher Stefanick" <chain...@email.msn.com> wrote in message
news:#mrltau6$GA.283@cpmsnbbsa09...
Mark D. Stock
Christopher Stefanick wrote:
>
> I have 2 instances I need to back up through onbar, and I'm wondering how
> many tape drives I need. They are both very small, about 1GB a piece, and
> should easily fit on the 4 GB dat drive I have. Of course I'm going to want
> the logs backed up too. I'm using onbar so that the whole thing is
> automated. How many tape drives do I need? Is onbar smart enough to be
> able to put system backups and logs on the same tape? If so, I could easily
> get by with 2 tape drives and possibly one. If not, I'll need at least 4 to
> avoid having to swap tapes daily. At that point, a juke box might be the
> way to go. Any suggestions?
It's not OnBar that manages the IO, but the storage manager you select
to use with OnBar. Most do allow storage of multiple backups on a single
tape, AFAIK, including file system backups.
As to the automation, that depends on what you are trying to do. A
storage manager will help you get everything on one tape, but if that
tape breaks, then you lose everything. For the cost of a second tape
drive, you might like the extra security of your logs on a different
tape to your archive. :-)
Alternatively, a stacker with a single tape drive can also help perform
multiple backups onto different tapes in a single drive. I have one
system that performs two level 0 archives (from different machines) and
a UNIX dump onto three separate tapes using a single drive with stacker,
OnTape and a clever bit of shell scripting. ;-)
Cheers,
--
Mark.
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