I proudly wear the banner of the Shittiest SysAdmin on /r/sysadmin. In that light, take what I say with a grain of salt and feel free to call me a fucking dumbass if it's warranted.
I have an Overland Neo4000e tape library hooked up to my Sun v480 with two LTO5 drives in the chassis. I work for a graphics company, so 10GB Photoshop files are the rule, not the exception. For a very small company, we generate ass loads of new data on a daily basis.
My boss was grilled by a major client of ours about offsite backup. As a result he's now motivated to do something about it. He's an honest guy and won't lie to the client about our capabilities, but his thriftiness make the Scotch look like free-spending drunken sailors. I've had to hold this network together with spit and bailing wire for quite a few years now. To give you an idea of what I'm dealing with, months after we started off-site tape rotation, I found out that the off-site storage location was the trunk of my boss' car. ಠ_ಠ
Anyway, boss man wants to take home a full backup once a month and then daily incrementals. I also need copies of those here in case we need to recover files off of tape.
I was thinking of a LTO5 tape duplicator, but this thing is $19k, and won't get approved.
One thought I had is using rsync to direct incremental backups to a daily directory and then making two full copies of that directory to tape. I haven't tested this yet.
Since I'm using ZFS on Solaris, another thought would be sending daily snapshots to a folder and then backing that directory up on either tape or 2.5 HD. A 500GB hard drive is much cheaper than tape, and since the media will be rotated on a monthly basis it doesn't have to have a 5 year shelf life.
I'm open to suggestions/ideas. IT best practices aren't practiced around here, so please give it to me with both barrels if need be.
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