Recommended Long Term Retention Job/Settings

[stephen.bailey]

Hello,

Looking for any recommendations for the best way for a long term retention job. We currently utilize tape for our monthly long term retention jobs, but will be moving this to cloud storage and I am trying to figure out the best way to accomplish this utilizing the least amount of online space as possible. The current jobs were configured by a former employee.

The current setup:

Daily jobs written to disk (30 day retention). There is also a copy job that writes these backups to disk at another office location.

Monthly job that backs up the Daily job to Tape. These tapes need to be retained for 7 years.

My initial though was to just recreate the current tape job, but point it to the cloud repository. I am getting some push back from my boss as the current tape job consumes ~5TB of (tape) space per month. Over the course of 7 years that would add up to ~420 TB, which will cost significantly more than writing to tape (estimated quotes are ~$3000/month at year 7). Not sure if there would be a more effective way to accomplish this which would utilize less space.

Thanks,

Steve

[david.domask]

Hi Steve, welcome to the forums.

It's hard to match the price for tape storage, as it's one of tape's strongest selling points -- cheap and reliable storage.

Typically with object storage (cloud) repositories, long term archiving is best done with Archive Tier and GFS backups. While this depends on your retention requirements, typically long-term archival GFS backups are moved to archive tier and kept on a low cost storage where the costs are typically much lower; however, keep in mind that data in archive tier must be retrieved before it can be used like normal data. This retrieval process typically incurs some cost from the provider and it's not immediate, so it's important to treat Archive Tier as Write Once Read (Almost) Never.

Our Scenario Calculators include estimation tools for Archive Tier, so try playing around with that a bit until you find a suitable balance of retention and cost.

[stephen.bailey]

Hi David,

Thanks for the response. Our initial storage quote was from Wasabi which is all Hot storage. I will get some quotes from providers who offer an Archive tier.

Thanks,

Steve

[david.domask]

Aha, just remember that it's going to be pretty tough to beat the price point for storage with tape, and part of those cloud costs include high availability, no management of the storage environment, etc. I'm doubtful you'll be able to price-match tape storage wise, but that higher cloud price does come with some benefits and relieves quite a bit of hardware management from you.