Re: Backup to USB

Thinking about the USB backup from a different perspective. Assuming this is the primary means of backing up, have you ever tried a restore? God forbid, a full restore?

An actual RDX unit would work fine, albeit at USB speeds. Have you asked how long you can be down while rebuilding/restoring?

Makes a used LTO tape library ($800), tape drive ($800 or so) cable and interface card (cheap too) look very reasonable. Even for 150GB.

Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On Mar 1, 2022, at 2:37 PM, dr2@xxxxxxxx wrote:

DrF, et al...

I'll use USB's and other USB externals for ad hoc as well. Simple save
to savf, the a bin ftp to external...never had any problems and it's an
easy way to get things off line or move from one unattached to another
when I can't FTP from box A to box B ..

/DR2

On 2022-03-01 15:03, Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis wrote:

I have used USB for ad-hoc backups but nothing more.

We had a customer migrate to our cloud recently and they sent us their full save on USB. It started to read and then failed. The thing looked tired and scratched. BI have never really trusted USB sticks for more than transient work.

Also as you're finding it's kinda slow too. :-)

- DrF

On 3/1/2022 12:29 PM, mlazarus wrote:

Does anyone backup their i to USB? What has your experience been?

For a while I was backing up to USB and it was working fine, maybe it took 2 - 3 hours. A couple of months ago the USB backup seemed to go to sleep for a 3-5 hours in the middle of the backup, then again further down. It started before I had put on the latest cume and group PTF's. The situation did not improve after I put the PTF's on.

As a comparative test, a functionally identical backup is being done to tape first and it completes within a reasonable amount of time (about 2 hours.) Now, after running 9+ hours I need to cancel it to let production run, so I don't know if it's just hanging or it's doing something. A guesstimate of the amount being saved is 150 GB.

IBM is looking into it, but I was wondering what others have experienced.

-mark

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