Charles Kincaid (5/13/2010)
alen teplitsky (5/13/2010)
i haven't done the cost analysis, but for a medium to larger environment i think tape and local onsite backups are cheaper. LTO-4 tape is dirt cheap and the big investment is the robot and backup softwareIt will be cheaper. Well you have to invest in the hardware. Then there is the time it takes to set it up and configure it properly. Those are all up front costs and you can amortize those over time. Then buy as many tapes as you want. They last a long time and you will want as many as you can handle and afford.
There is one word, though, that is key to what you say. That word is onsite. If you are going to use tapes, and I am not saying that you should not use them, then at least put some kind of strictly enforced off site rotation plan into place.
Talk to someone who has has a building fire, flood, storm damage, or earthquake
did some quick math and with 100 LTO tapes that i have in my robot now at 2TB per tape i get $30,000 per month just for the storage cost. the transfer costs are extra.
our investment has been less than $40,000 so far for the robot, software, tapes and a few other extras we had to buy along the way over the last year. we just bought 20 LTO-4 tapes for $778. that's 20-60 TB of data we can store depending on the compression