Everybody knows they have to do backups, but they are such a royal pain. The software is mostly cranky and hard to configure and harder to use, and mostly doesn’t let you know it has a problem until you already have a problem you can’t help but notice. And then when you pull the backup tape out of the closet the stuff you want is never on the tape the software said it was on. Well it’s not on the tape you think the software was telling you it was on, but that’s because the weirdo who wrote the software doesn’t share your idea of what constitutes a sensible label. In fact, the planet where tape drive programmers hail from probably doesn’t have a breathable atmosphere.
Oh, yeah, and your backup probably really still is on a tape because your reseller and your IT consultant both told you not to trust spinning disks for backups. Even though you’ve got more RAIDs than the vice squad. And despite the mirrored USB external disk you’re using for secondary backup. Not good enough. They insisted you have tape as well, so you can take it off-site to safety. Just in case the building burns down. Like that’s ever going to happen. OK, so it did happen, and now you’re shuffling through tapes trying to find the last full backup. And it takes ages. Surely there’s a better way?
Well obviously there is, otherwise why would we have bothered with that introduction? What you really need is a removable hard disk cartridge with decent capacity. Does such a beastie exist, we hear you ask. Why yes, it does and its name is REV, son of JAZZ, grandson of ZIP, still made by the Iomega outfit, recently acquired by mega-storage-backup company EMC. Heck, they liked Iomega’s REV so much that they bought the whole company. Well that must be the reason, since REV sales aren’t strong enough to make or break EMC’s Retrospect software division, despite a copy now being bundled with every REV drive.
However, the latest and greatest REV unit packs 120GB onto a removable hard disk cartridge, which of course is more like 112GB after being formatted by Windows, and it comes as either an external USB drive or an internal drive with SATA interface that you can shoehorn directly into your file server, or workstation if you absolutely must. We decided to review the internal version, hoping for better performance than you can eke out of an external USB drive, despite the theoretical USB speed of 60MB/s. We’ve never achieved that sort of speed with an external USB drive, with Storage Craft’s ShadowProtect maxing out at around 12MB/s. Backup imaging speeds of 60MB/s are usually only achieved from one directly attached RAID array to another in our experience.
Besides, you could argue that an external USB drive of any kind is portable enough to take off-site, and they’re pretty cheap too, so if you had several you could theoretically drag one back and forth between the office and your house, so that would erode some of the advantage of the REV approach, apart from the size thing. Then again, some of those portable USB drives that house a notebook hard disk are fairly small. Nah, they’re also much slower than regular hard drives. And they’re not really meant to be dropped. Plus they nearly always need external power so they’re a bit fiddly to connect every day, not really the kind of off-site regime you can assign to the junior office staff.
The internal mounting kit for the Iomega REV drive comes with all the bits required to install a 3.5” floppy-sized device into a spare opening, it’s just that it’s been a while since we performed this sort of surgery, and we don’t recall it being quite as challenging last time. Rubik’s Cube it’s not, however, and once assembled it’s all really simple and the thing even uses a SATA cable so it’s much easier to connect and a lot harder to get wrong than the old flat cable attached devices of olden days. Once installed, and the server rebooted, perusing the manual we read the important advice to “install the software before the hardware”. Whuh? Surely that won’t matter.
Well, OK, it doesn’t really matter, so long as you’re not in a screaming hurry to get the job done and move onto something else, or heaven forbid, you decided to install the REV into the production file server while everyone was out at Sally’s farewell lunch – hope it’s a long one. The real problem is with Windows. Quelle surprise. Windows thinks the REV drive is an almighty large CD drive, but it has a total go slow curdle attack trying to figure out why the CD drive has a 120GB capacity and is also seemingly writeable at really high speeds. This causes Windows to spin the hourglass a lot. And we mean a lot. We persisted and continued to install the Iomega driver anyway, but we’d advise everyone else to RTFM (read the freaking manual) and install the software first.
After installing the driver and rebooting, everything was back to normal – given that we’re using Windows that is – and the REV drive now had its own icon instead of looking like a bottomless CD drive. Time to fire up ShadowProtect and dump an image or two. The good news is that ShadowProtect, and no doubt your very own choice of backup software, has no trouble seeing the REV drive as just another hard drive, but it knew it was removable. This is a good thing for backup software to know, particularly if it has its own way of letting you know when to take media off-site. And the performance was a handy 15MB/s bursting to 20MB/s while saving the image.
That’s handily faster than an external USB drive, and being a “disk” any file is instantly accessible, unlike a tape drive, which has to hunt them down for you with what seems like endless whirring and whining and generally disagreeable behaviour. The naked REV drive, ready to insert into your favourite file server, will set you back around $840 at recommended prices, but we’re sure you can do better with a bit of haggling. If you’d rather have the external USB version it’s the same price anyway. The blank disks are about $147 each in singles or $130 each in a five-pack.
Yes, that’s a tad pricier than blank tapes but the REV drive is way cheaper than a tape drive (of similar native capacity) in the first place. The new 120GB drive can also read the old 70GB REV disks if you need to migrate, but it seems the new drive can’t write anything to the smaller capacity media. Oh, and since this new 120GB REV supersedes the previous 70GB REV drive, if your capacity requirements are a tad lower, there should be some cracker run-out bargains on offer real soon. So there you have it, the old “I hate tape it’s always crashing and besides the drives are so expensive and it’s so slow” excuse no longer holds. Get yourself REV’d up and get your precious backups off-site. And get the smoke detector batteries changed while you’re at it.