Eric

Eric

you addressed something we try to do in our data center at the moment. Reducing or even replacing the traditional tape backup. We have a multi vendor environment and that just makes it more complicated. There isn't one tool that can manage the snaps and replications on all platforms. So instead of one tape backup software we have now at least one software for every vendor.

When it comes to snaps and replicas on block devices (like SAN, iSCSI) there are even more problems than on NFS and CIFS. You have different operating systems with different filesystems and different volume managers. The backup tool has to know them all and manage them. Restoring whole volumes isn't that big of an issue. You just umount, restore and mount again. A single file restore is way more complicated. If you want to mount it on the same host, the backup tool has to deal with volume manager and filesystem ids on the disks. You could use mount hosts, but if you have several small external customers this could get quite expensive.

A software that can manage all this over different vendors would be great. But then you still have the problem of you production on a EMC DMX and your development system on a Netapp over NFS. You can't copy the data that easy.

So basically it comes to this: Does your backup handle the backups on data level (eg. email within my exchange mailbox), file level (like oracle data files) or device level. The further up the easier it is for the application.

Oh, and don't forget the operating systems on the internal hard drives. They usually need backup too.

@eric: I think you mixed two things: Archiving and backup. Your backups are usually not needed that long. If you ever had to use a one week old backup for the restore of a production Oracle database you were in really big trouble. Either you had a huge amount of data loss or a really long downtime of your production. Everything that needs to be archived also needs to be converted. I don't think you can still open a database that you were using in 1990. It is just quite convenient to use backup for archiving.

Ref. tape backups: in todays environments passing audits are a requirement. some laws require
data to held for 7 years, other much longer than that. Our HR dept. require 75 years!!
If we were to backup to tape we d need to keep the tape hardware for 75 years. That just does not
add up financially or in ANY other way. Tape is not a solution.

Put it on disk and you ll be able to access your data and migrate it across to new technologies much easier. Everybody knows how easy its to read disk spindles.