Re: using USB flash drives as backup media

Tech Tip: Click here to run a free scan for Windows Errors and optimize PC performance

On 04/07/09 14:52, biff wrote:
Thanks for the responses all. I would like to add that we move the backups to a different building on a weekly basis. If we were to go with backups using hard drives then would we just put a server in another building? Also how many hard drives would the typical small to mid size file server backup to? If you used this type of strategy and did full backups on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis then would you need to save all these backup states to the same disk which then mirrors to a group of 3 or 4 additional hard drives? That would require a fairly large set of hard drives but of course hard drives are fairly large these days. There would be 2 weeks worth of dailys before being overwritten. There would be 1 months worth of weeklys before being overwritten. There would be 1 years worth of monthlys.

If you have network connectivity between the buildings I might strongly suggest that you look in to putting a low end server there with lots of disk space and pushing your backups across the network to a mapped drive (NAS).

Something to keep in mind about hard drives (that is exasperated by using them like tapes) is that (IMHO) the most common mode of failure is that they will simply not spin up after some point in time. So you might write data to it just fine but not be able to spin it up to retrieve the data at a later point in time.

Is this SAN just another windows server stacked with hard drives? What OS is run typically? I am new to SANs.

A Storage Area Network (SAN for short) is a network that communicates over storage technology be it fiber channel, iSCSI, ATA over Ethernet, NDAS, etc and communicates with technology specific protocols. Where as a Network Attached Storage (NAS for short) is a network that communicates over traditional network technologies (i.e. Ethernet) and communicates with standard network file systems (SMB / CIFS).

SANs usually have a chunk of storage allocated to a specific system (or cluster) that is not shared with other systems. Where as a NAS will allow the same chunk of storage to be accessed by multiple systems at the same time.

In short a SAN can be equated to a really long IDE / SATA / SCSI / USB / 1394 (*cough* FireWire *cough*) cable. Where as a NAS is a mapped drive to an (existing) server.

If you have multiple servers (NAS) that you want to backup to one server in a different building, I think I'd recommend that you copy files to a mapped drive that is accessed by as many servers as you want. Where as SAN is going to require allocating space specifically for each server that you want backed up.

As far as what OS would be running on the SAN, it can be a lot of different things from Windows Storage Server to Linux to even more exotic things specific to the SAN hardware.



Grant. . . .
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: will it work?
    ... I want to have a home server on my network. ... 500gb hard drives, 10/100 lan. ... It needs to work with both windows and macs on ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Linux firewall vs Windows and Hardware based firewalls
    ... make regular off line backups ... ... restore your "server" from backups to make sure it works ... sniffing your network before you noticed them ... ... -- lots of security policy rules to create ... ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Questions Relating to Administering Windows 2000 Server
    ... installed the network client on the target computer. ... Sarah has been attempting to install Windows 2000 ... Server for two days. ... Sarah has checked the cables and hard drives. ...
    (microsoft.public.cert.exam.mcse)
  • Questions Relating to Administering Windows 2000 Server
    ... installed the network client on the target computer. ... Sarah has been attempting to install Windows 2000 ... Server for two days. ... Sarah has checked the cables and hard drives. ...
    (microsoft.public.cert.exam.mcse)
  • Re: Backup solution question
    ... Tape is my preferred method, ... We usually spec three of these devices at 3x the available server ... We do full backups every night, ... >> enclosures are a low cost way of rotating Hard drives to provide ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)