>>>>>We have a requirement of taking regular backups of Server files and individual users files.. I'm in a confusion what to buy for that ??
>>>>>
>>>>>CD-Rewriter ?
>>>>>Tape Drives ?
>>>>>Zip Drives ?
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>If your primary interest is backup, I'd strongly recommend going with a tape solution; the cost/MB of storage is lower than any of the other options you're considering, and there's a wide range of software that can schedule backups either from a owkstation or with a server-based backup solution. Tapes are reusable easily. A number of different formats are available; the one I use the most is DAT; DDS-3 (the current high-end DAT storage option) can hold up to ~24GB/tape compressed; I use the older DDS-2 formats, which can hold up to about 8GB/tape. DAT is a relatively expensive solution from a hardware standpoint (new DDS-2 units are in the $700-900 range, and DDS-3 solutions are $1000-1500 typically.) DAT has advantages over lower cost solutions in terms of reliability and portability.
>>>>
>>>>The low-end backup solutions are generally based around the Travan technologies. TR-4 units can hold 7-10GB/tape compressed; they aren't as fast as DAT drives, but the hardware costs significantly less money, in the $200-300 range. Meida costs are higher - I pay >$10/DDS-2 DAT tape, which an equivalent Travan tape costs in the $25-30 range. There's more variation in implenmentations between vendors for the Travan drives; while I can take a DAT tape written on one manufacturer's drive and read it on another manufacturer's drive with a fair degree of certainty, I don't have that assurance with Travan backups between vendors.
>>>>
>>>>Of the options you list, Zip drives are the worst choice - they're slow, and will require manual intervention for backups >100MB. The cost per MB of storage is prohibitive as well. n The only thing recommending Zip is that it's fairly portable.
>>>>
>>>>I would not consider CD-RW as a viable backup medium. Again, the drive limits the amount that you can store unattended to the size of a CD (~600-650MB). CD is slow, and depending on the CD software, may require that you create a master image before backup, requiring an equivalent amount of free storage to what you want written to CD. The CD drives usually require that the only activity on the system at the time the CD is being written is writing the CD; pauses can result in unreadable results.
>>>>
>>>>CD has the virtue of writing archival backups; if you need to make a backup that will be readable 10 years from now, the optical CD media is less subject to damage than tape or removable cartridge magnetic storage. It's also readable on a DVD drive, so that it's more likely to still be a viable transfer material 10 years from now.
>>>>
>>>>The cost of CD-RW material is quite high; I can buy CD-R (write once) media for somewhere in the $1-$1.50/blank CD in bulk, with each CD-RW costing more than 10x as much.
>>>>
>>>>Ed
>>>
>>>Thanks for your detailed reply on this..
>>>
>>>Personally speaking I was in favour of going for CD-RW i.e. due to following reasons
>>>
>>>1. Our data is not more then say 100-200 mb for each user, so I was thinking to put the writer on my NT Server, (I've yet to chk whether it is possible or not so that all users can take backup)
>>
>>It's improbable at best, in that the CD writer requires too much attention to put on the server itself, at least in the case of the Mitsumi, Ricoh and HP units that I've used. You'd be far better off attaching it to a workstation and downloading the image to a local heard drive to lessen network traffic and avoid things that might cause the write process to pause, which will ruin the CD image you're trying to burn.
>>
>>>2. As Cd drive is very common, the recorded cd can be used anywhere & given to anybody.
>>
>>Yes, but not all CD readers, especially ones that predate the last Rdbook release, will read CD-RW media. If you want a universal distribution media, get a unit that supports standard formats and burn CD-R (write-once images.)
>>
>>>3. Backups are not frequent, I'll give u example like we would like to take backup of say generated invoice(s) for say 3 months and put it a safe place, so we can refer it later
>>>same way we will be taking backup of Outlook mails and will be keeping it for any future use...& some other req. like.. Most likely a user will be taking backup in a year 30-35 times..
>>
>>That's downright suicidal IMO; I back up everything (literally - my home systems back up to a DAT drive overnight, as do all the servers at the office) at least daily; when I program, I usually write my intermediate steps into SourceSafe at least hourly, and I use a Jaz drive both to transport work between home and office and as a temporary image area for WIP. It depends on whether the value of your work product is greater than the cost of the media it's written on; in my case, I charge clients a lot more for an hour of my time than the cost of an 8GB DAT tape, or even a 1GB Jaz cartridge.
>>
>>Since backups can be run unattended, I'd rethink your position here. If backup capacity is an issue, there are tape autoloaders with capacities of upwards of 96GB for DAT, or close to a TB for DLT that handle multiple tapes in an autoloading cartridge. We use a 20 tape rotation at Weatherhill; this allows me to go back to End Of Day for a week, End Of Week for a month, and End Of Month for a year, for a cost of <$300 in media. We also burn a tape a month that holds our system both before and immediately after we run our EOM Close, and periodically, we burn a CD with critical information on CD-R; since it serves as an unalterable snapshot of the condition of ourt system.
>>
>>>
>>>I'm very new to these things and don't know much abt. it, pls ignore me
>>>I would like to hear your comments/views on that...
>>>
>
>Thanks a lot for taking out your time and clearing my confusions..
>
>Only few things, I want to clear...
>
>1. For copying Data to CD, do we have to mirror all the data & do it ??

It depends on the CD burning software you use; Using Adaptec's EZ-CD Creator, you get a more reliable result constructing an image of the CD you want to burn on a local hard drive that's completely defragmented; Adaptec's GEAR is a bit less sensitive to disk fragmentation, but doesn't work with some of the low-end CD-R drives I've seen.

A new 4-6GB IDE drive costs <$150, so I don't see this as a particularly great problem. I keep a 1GB partition entirely empty on the system I have a CD writer on at my office, and format it and build the image there when I want one.

>2. Can We Dat Drive on Server ?? Will it put more load on it ??

The DAT drive can be either server or workstation based; we use server-based software (CA-ARCServe) at our office, which can back up both servers and client stations on the LAN. I use BackupExec at home (now Seagate Backup) which is fine since I don't have NetWare servers in the mix like I do at the office. These are two of the more expensive pieces of server-based software; other things like NovaBack don't cost as much, but may not offer some of the features that ARCServe and BackupExec do.

Most low-end (read: cheap) backup software will be workstation based; you'll be able to back up server data, but you may not be able to grab some information like server egistry details, or Novell Bindery files, access rights and the like. ARCServe has a numbner of features that allow us to mirror selected directories across to a secoond server, and will back up files that are open. That, combined with the multiplatform support, makes it a good fit at my office (and for a number of the clients that I work with as well.) I use BackupExec at home because it backs up both Win9x and WinNT systems, and when I bought it, the cost of the single server version was very attractive.

>3. How easy it is to backup/restore data from Dat Drive ?? I mean as compare to CD..
>

It's a feature of the backup software; both BackupExec and ARCServe have a very easy mechanism for restoring things (both maintain catalogs or databases of information on the tapes that the backup software manages.) if you're concerned with restoring user rights and permissions, backup software will preserve that informatuion better than making a copy of the data alone to a CD. The only advantage I see to CD is that it's easy to work with data on the CD without restoring it, but it's slow, and there's no easy mechanism to know what's there without looking. If you start trying to compress data by putting it into Zip files on the CD, it's a bigger pain to find what you're looking for.

The DAT drives that I work with have read/write rates of about 45-50MB/minute, faster than you'll find on most CD-RW drives.

As far as ease of backup, tape wins hands down. I can back up 5GB of stuff without looking at the machine with a DDS-2 or DDS-3 drive; with a CD drive, you'd have to change the CD 8-10 times. With an autoloader, I can back up hundreds of GB of stuff. DAT has auto read-after-write, making it the winner in terms of speed and capacity measured against anything except maybe DLT (another high-end tape technology).

The hardware required for server-based DAT is not cheap; in general, you're looking at a busmastering SCSI adpater like the Adaptec 292x or 294x family, or the BusLogic 93x family of adapters, and a DAT drive. Since our servers use SCSI drives anyway, this isn't a major problem; we use the Adaptec 2940UW, 3940UW, or embedded SCSI chips on the server motherboard and the ARO1130CA RAIDPort adapter, all of which can support at least 7 different SCSI devices (in the case of the ARO1130CA stuff, we have 2 independent channels, each supporting up to 15 devices.) You'll have the same requirement for the better-performing SCSI-based CD burners; using a busmastering adapter lessens the burden on the host CPU.) The drives cost anywhere from $500 up, dpeending on features; we use the HP 1533A DDS-2 drives (the raw drive version of HP's SureStore 8000) at the office, and I use an older Archive 4326NP at home.

Travan tape drives are widely available in IDE versions, which are less expensive to implement, but aren't as flexible as far as how the hardware is mounted (virtually all the IDE-based Travan drives are internal mounts; the SCSI drives we use are external, which makes moving them easy if it comes down to that.

>Pls advs..