Air Gap Backups
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@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
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@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
if you work in a 24x7 centre maybe you can get one of the night sysadmins to just unplug the backup medium once the job is complete?
Right, but again, tapes are built specifically for this. Eject on finish, have the wetware come and pull the time sometime before the next shift and insert the new tape before the backup window starts.
Yes, you can use anything instead of tape here. But tape is purpose built to do every aspect of this as perfectly as possible.
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@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
i did that years ago at a place that had mainframe admins 24x7, they just added it to their nightly tasks.
Essentially every company of any size does this. It's a super rare large firm that doesn't have removable media that needs to be taken to storage daily.
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@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
then just add powering the device back up as one of the daily tasks to be undertaken by the sysadmins or whoever.
If you power it back up, it's not air gapped.
But neither is the tape while it's inserted in the drive.
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@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
LTO drives start at $2K and most single drive bays are more like $5K+... but I know those "drives as tapes" solution from the 2010's weren't cheap either...
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@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
LTO drives start at $2K and most single drive bays are more like $5K+... but I know those "drives as tapes" solution from the 2010's weren't cheap either...
Yes, the drives are a large one-time up-front expense. The media is generally cheaper than HDD of the same size, which is just one reason why tape is often the preferred medium for air gapped and/or offsite backups.
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@travisdh1 said in Air Gap Backups:
@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
LTO drives start at $2K and most single drive bays are more like $5K+... but I know those "drives as tapes" solution from the 2010's weren't cheap either...
Yes, the drives are a large one-time up-front expense. The media is generally cheaper than HDD of the same size, which is just one reason why tape is often the preferred medium for air gapped and/or offsite backups.
Boy they must have come down...I recall when LTO 2 (yea a long time ago) where stupid expensive!
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@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@travisdh1 said in Air Gap Backups:
@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
LTO drives start at $2K and most single drive bays are more like $5K+... but I know those "drives as tapes" solution from the 2010's weren't cheap either...
Yes, the drives are a large one-time up-front expense. The media is generally cheaper than HDD of the same size, which is just one reason why tape is often the preferred medium for air gapped and/or offsite backups.
Boy they must have come down...I recall when LTO 2 (yea a long time ago) where stupid expensive!
LTO 2? Bah, young people will never know the joys of DLT.
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@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
then just add powering the device back up as one of the daily tasks to be undertaken by the sysadmins or whoever.
If you power it back up, it's not air gapped.
But neither is the tape while it's inserted in the drive.
But you eject tapes, no human needed. The system, by default, auto-air gaps.
The difference is culture. When people use "turn it off" technology, they mean "and then turn it on again". When people use tapes they mean "eject and take to storage".
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@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
Find me something cheaper. No backup is cheap, but there is a reason all cold storage uses tape... nothing comes close in price per GB.
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@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@travisdh1 said in Air Gap Backups:
@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
LTO drives start at $2K and most single drive bays are more like $5K+... but I know those "drives as tapes" solution from the 2010's weren't cheap either...
Yes, the drives are a large one-time up-front expense. The media is generally cheaper than HDD of the same size, which is just one reason why tape is often the preferred medium for air gapped and/or offsite backups.
Boy they must have come down...I recall when LTO 2 (yea a long time ago) where stupid expensive!
No, they weren't. You just felt that way because you didn't have to price out a comparable alternative. Everyone imagines that they are expensive, but when you compare against other options, they are cheap.
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@travisdh1 said in Air Gap Backups:
@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@siringo said in Air Gap Backups:
you used to be able to get those 'cassette' drives which were just disks in a casing that were used in a similar way to tapes. maybe there's something similar to that with a capacity of 1TB+ ?
Sure but... why? Tape is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
The only part I might disagree with is cheaper. tapes are super expensive, though in the long run I suppose they could be cheaper.
LTO drives start at $2K and most single drive bays are more like $5K+... but I know those "drives as tapes" solution from the 2010's weren't cheap either...
Yes, the drives are a large one-time up-front expense. The media is generally cheaper than HDD of the same size, which is just one reason why tape is often the preferred medium for air gapped and/or offsite backups.
Cheaper to buy, cheaper to transport, cheaper to store, last longer.
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Since we are a SMB we used to use Tape (well RDX), but with people leaving the company, relaying on people to remember to take them home, put the right ones in
I hoping they will change their software soon so i don't need to worry about it
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Tape dropped below $.01 / GB seven years ago and is cheaper now as new tech has come out.
Hard drives are still more like $.02 today. So hard drives are more than a decade behind in pricing as a starting point.
(That's about $8/TB vs $20/TB)
And that's enterprise, archival tape that is screaming fast vs. cheap, crappy, consumer SATA drives that are dog slow. So we aren't talking apples to oranges. We are talking tape Ferrari vs. a disk Yugo.
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@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:
Since we are a SMB we used to use Tape (well RDX), but with people leaving the company, relaying on people to remember to take them home, put the right ones in
There are services for that. But if you use REAL take instead of disk, the eject function makes that so much easier because if they don't take it home, you get alerts that the tape wasn't changed.
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@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:
Since we are a SMB we used to use Tape (well RDX), but with people leaving the company, relaying on people to remember to take them home, put the right ones in
There are services for that. But if you use REAL take instead of disk, the eject function makes that so much easier because if they don't take it home, you get alerts that the tape wasn't changed.
I thought RDX did the same?
or could at least? -
@dashrender said in Air Gap Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Air Gap Backups:
@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:
Since we are a SMB we used to use Tape (well RDX), but with people leaving the company, relaying on people to remember to take them home, put the right ones in
There are services for that. But if you use REAL take instead of disk, the eject function makes that so much easier because if they don't take it home, you get alerts that the tape wasn't changed.
I thought RDX did the same?
or could at least?Maybe they could. If they were ejecting and no one was taking it home, there should have been the ability to catch it really quickly.
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@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:
How would people define this?
Just send a backup to the cloud, or only achevied by backing up to tape (or other media) and store somewhere?We're looking to backup 4-5 VM's on a vmware host. 1TB max.
I have done it with the S3 Vault Lock feature, you can use it in conjunction with Storage Gateway (effectively emulating tapes), or using objects directly.
Once put in compliance mode, there is no way to delete the objects before the compliance period ends. It's also very cheap.
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@francesco-provino said in Air Gap Backups:
I have done it with the S3 Vault Lock feature, you can use it in conjunction with Storage Gateway (effectively emulating tapes), or using objects directly.
Once put in compliance mode, there is no way to delete the objects before the compliance period ends. It's also very cheap.
Would a proper use case for this be something like ... if I have a bare metal backup such as acronis, then store this on S3 Glacier Deep Archive for the "Oh Shit" complete disaster recovery get things back. And then use the S3 Glacier for the regular backups with incrementals of data? Seems like if I had to rebuild hardware, I could use the Deep to get to a baseline, and then normal Glacier for any restores of data. Likewise, if only data was missing or currupt, the S3 Glacier would suffice. If the only difference between Glacier and Glacier Deep is 1/4 the cost and 12 hours vs. 1 minute ... then for many applications, the Glacier Deep Archive would suffice.
Yes / No ?? -
@francesco-provino said in Air Gap Backups:
I have done it with the S3 Vault Lock feature, you can use it in conjunction with Storage Gateway (effectively emulating tapes), or using objects directly.
Once put in compliance mode, there is no way to delete the objects before the compliance period ends. It's also very cheap.
I'm trailing this now. Well to S3 storage, if it works I'll enable the Lock bit
