John Croson's Blog Home

Image via CrunchBase We've been backing up to LTO2 tapes for years using a Dell PowerVault 132T with an internal IBM Ultra drive. Differential backups from our SAN don't take too long, but full backups take nearly an entire day. The backup set has grown as the business has, and it's rapidly approaching 1tb, spanning 3-4 tapes. About 10 days ago the internal drive finally croaked. Swallowed a tape and wouldn't let go. I was able to retrieve it using some directions found on IBM's website, but after trying another backup, only to have it fail with the same results, we realised a change was needed. What we needed was a reasonably priced, reliable destination for our data. I knew that a replacement LTO2 drive was going to be expensive, and probably needed to be a Dell approved model that had the proper firmware to work; picking up just any internal SCSI drive wasn't going to cut it, and this was confirmed after poking around in Dells support area. I was able ...

Last week Friday, a tape got stuck in our Dell PowerVault 132T Library. Luckily, I was able to remove the tape and resume order to our backups ...or so I thought. After checking in Saturday it was clear that we were going to be without backups, something that makes my skin crawl. Image by artescienza via Flickr So promptly after our return to work after a nice long Labor Day weekend, I rushed out and to purchase an external drive to backup data to. My choice for such emergency trips is usually Milwaukee PC , since they are likely to have what I need in a pinch even if it is a few more dollars. Image via Wikipedia They indicated there indeed was a 2tb drive in stock, so I bought an enclosure and we headed over to the display case to retrieve the drive. Unfortunately the drive was no where to be found...bummer. A 1tb drive was likely not going to be quite large enough, but it was going to have to do. I started planning what data to trim from the backups to make room, then sudd...