Tape vs. DVD/Blue Ray

[rmueller]

Any one have any thoughts on what would be a better long term solution for archival....tape or some type of optical media.

We have Veeam backing up local (between 2-6 months of recovery points local), Veeam copy jobs send daily backups to remote site. Veeam copy jobs are set to do 7 restore points with one weekly archival. A script hard links the oldest full (the archive full) into a directory where a Veeam tape job puts the full on tape...its getting to the point where we are moving 8Tb to tape every week...The plan is to rotate tapes once a year.

The problem is, its a lot of tapes and a lot of changing tapes over the course of a year. Looking for a better solution.

Second part of the question, does Veeam have any capability to control an optical juke box?

ron.

[veremin]

If I were you, I would rather stick to the media that was designed specifically for longer term archival purposes (tapes).

Second part of the question, does Veeam have any capability to control an optical juke box?

No, it doesn't. Nevertheless, I believe that process of writing last backup file to optical disks can be easily scripted and specified, then, as the post job activity.

Thanks.

[Dima P.]

Hello Ron,
Double layer Blue Ray Disk = 50 GB (~5$)
LTO 4 Tape Media = 1.6 TB (~25$)

One lto4 cartridge equals ~32 double layer blue rays disks in disk space (and could cost additional ~135$). Additionally, the performance of the optical media is not on the competitive level with tape media yet (writing speed is lower, software compression only impacts performance). I guess optical storage media is far from being the best solution to replace tapes now. Possibly this is going to change as some optical media vendors declared serious improvements in this area.

Meanwhile, when question of tape replacement comes up - users prefer low cost disk storage, but, of course, it is up to you what to choose.