jamesd3rd
09-28-2006, 02:55 AM
A customer of mine has been using external USB drives to perform backups. This has been working pretty well for the past year or so. There have been a few snags however with regards to power supplies seemingly weakening to the point of being unable to get the drives to spin up. When this happens, they don't mount and are not detected by the server.
I've decided to go with a different solution rather than continue to buy external cases. I put together a backup server with removable drive bays so he can swap the drives when he needs to. He's aware of the fact that he will have to shut down the server every time he needs to swap the drive but he's ok with that because he pretty much had to do that anyway when he had to stop the USB drives before switching them.
Here's the situation. Some of the drives are now full (120GB) with others slowly reaching the point of getting full. The backups would append to the previous backup rather then replace it. That was done for retrieval purposes in case someone deleted something between full backups. I'm wondering what the best thing to do is at this point. Should he reuse the drives and overwrite the backup data? Should he shelve the drives and buy new ones in the event he needs to retrieve data from the old ones that are full even though I've only had to a restore once or twice in the past couple years?
The folder that is being backed up is about 8 gigs. It contains pretty much all correspondence throughout the life of the company. If he chooses to reuse the drives that are full, I think he would like to offload data from one of the full drives. I'm looking for suggestions as to what would be the best approach to conserving the old backed up data. I could try to burn the most recent full backup to a couple DVDs. I could have him purchase an even larger drive (400-500GB) and archive the most recent full backup. Any thoughts?
I've decided to go with a different solution rather than continue to buy external cases. I put together a backup server with removable drive bays so he can swap the drives when he needs to. He's aware of the fact that he will have to shut down the server every time he needs to swap the drive but he's ok with that because he pretty much had to do that anyway when he had to stop the USB drives before switching them.
Here's the situation. Some of the drives are now full (120GB) with others slowly reaching the point of getting full. The backups would append to the previous backup rather then replace it. That was done for retrieval purposes in case someone deleted something between full backups. I'm wondering what the best thing to do is at this point. Should he reuse the drives and overwrite the backup data? Should he shelve the drives and buy new ones in the event he needs to retrieve data from the old ones that are full even though I've only had to a restore once or twice in the past couple years?
The folder that is being backed up is about 8 gigs. It contains pretty much all correspondence throughout the life of the company. If he chooses to reuse the drives that are full, I think he would like to offload data from one of the full drives. I'm looking for suggestions as to what would be the best approach to conserving the old backed up data. I could try to burn the most recent full backup to a couple DVDs. I could have him purchase an even larger drive (400-500GB) and archive the most recent full backup. Any thoughts?