using USB flash drives as backup media

Is there any disadvantage to using USB flash drives as your backup media for
your server? Granted that the biggest reasonable USB flash drive is only 64
GB but a good tape drive plus media is pretty expensive. It would be close
which is overall more expensive if you buy a collection of higher capacity
USB flash drives vs. a 100/200 tape drive plus tapes.

Shouldn't the backup speed but OK if you use USB 2.0 ports? Any downside to
using a collection of USB flash drives instead of tape drive plus tapes?

 

"biff" <biff@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:4CB33D69-CF4F-4C70-BEE2-B8175BC4106B@microsoft.com...
> Is there any disadvantage to using USB flash drives as your backup media
> for
> your server? Granted that the biggest reasonable USB flash drive is only
> 64
> GB but a good tape drive plus media is pretty expensive. It would be
> close
> which is overall more expensive if you buy a collection of higher capacity
> USB flash drives vs. a 100/200 tape drive plus tapes.
>
> Shouldn't the backup speed but OK if you use USB 2.0 ports? Any downside
> to
> using a collection of USB flash drives instead of tape drive plus tapes?

It's a matter of preference. I actually stopped using tapes several years
ago - they were just too troublesome and too slow. Remember - they are
sequentially accessed. Disk drives use random access.

 

Biff,

How much would a USB hard drive cost compared to a few 64 GB thumb drives??

Rich W.

biff wrote:
> Is there any disadvantage to using USB flash drives as your backup media for
> your server? Granted that the biggest reasonable USB flash drive is only 64
> GB but a good tape drive plus media is pretty expensive. It would be close
> which is overall more expensive if you buy a collection of higher capacity
> USB flash drives vs. a 100/200 tape drive plus tapes.
>
> Shouldn't the backup speed but OK if you use USB 2.0 ports? Any downside to
> using a collection of USB flash drives instead of tape drive plus tapes?

 

Note: if you are using usb flash drives no problem. but you can use san
storage device(storage area network) it is some expensive but more space and
fault tolrence.

--
Message posted via http://www.winserverkb.com

 

>How much would a USB hard drive cost compared to a few 64 GB thumb drives??

Note: Usb hard drive cost value 140$. of 64 gb.
Thumb drives cost value 250$ of 64 gb.

But hard drive reliable and fault tolrence compate to thumb drive.

--
Message posted via http://www.winserverkb.com

 

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.

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

"samanderson123 via WinServerKB.com" wrote:

> Note: if you are using usb flash drives no problem. but you can use san
> storage device(storage area network) it is some expensive but more space and
> fault tolrence.
>
> --
> Message posted via http://www.winserverkb.com
>
>

 

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. . . .

 

Grant,

Thanks a lot for the info. I believe a NAS is more suited for me. It would
just backup one server at the moment. I imagine I would want to have a
mirror or some type of RAID on the NAS server. I will need to research some
on NAS for best practices.

"Grant Taylor" wrote:

> 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. . . .
>

 

On 4/8/2009 4:36 PM, biff wrote:
> Thanks a lot for the info. I believe a NAS is more suited for me.
> It would just backup one server at the moment. I imagine I would
> want to have a mirror or some type of RAID on the NAS server. I will
> need to research some on NAS for best practices.

You are welcome.

I think NAS is somewhat of a retroactive name that came out after SAN
became popular for what servers have been doing for a long time.

There are NAS appliances (lots of people make them) out there, but you
can do the exact same thing with any old computer with lots of drive
space and a share.

Depending on what you are wanting, you can use an inexpensive SATA
firmware RAID card or software RAID in Windows. (I say "firmware"
because most low end RAID cards really use the system's CPU to do their
processing and as such is not a true ""hardware RAID card.)



Grant. . . .