backup solutions

[homer15]

hey everyone,

up until now, i've managed to get away with a single tape drive backup solution at my work. this has actually involved me running a backup on some servers overnight, and a live backup on others during the day with tape switching happening a few times a day. it's cumbersome enough for me, but when my wife had our baby a few weeks ago (and a few weeks early), i realized nobody here currently knew how to manage all the switching at the right time. even so we got by.

but now we are getting a new, very large server that is also going to need to be backed up. in order to address this, we're getting a large nas server we backups will be centrally stored. but i still want to backup up my backups to be kept offsite. the nas server is going to be 3 tb's, but for a while i doubt we'll get much higher than 800 gb's.

how would you suggest i tackle new backups? i don't mind multiple tape solutions, as long as i don't have to manually switch out tapes several times a day. it would be nice if the backup drives didn't have to be attached to one specific machine, but i know that is probably an unrealistic hope. thanks for any info.

[glc]

What you need is a tape autoloader.

Example: http://www.exabyte.com/products/prod...fm?prod_id=621