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Image of Raid, to tape possible wiht Acronis?

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I've got an unexpected issue with my backups.  I was using tape (DAT320) but that is deprecated and you can't get the tapes anymore.  I got a good deal on a new LTO4 tape drive.  But now I find you need 2  supercomputers writing simultaneously to write to it fast enough that it does not "shoeshine" the tape.

The issue is my backusp are mostly photos, lots of them, and big directory strucutres.  None of that helps tape backups.  I can't gt the throughput on the many relatively small (3M) files.

One soluiton is to make an image and then backup the image.  That way you have one big file to stream.  My system might just barely handle that.

To complicate matters, my home server only has room for one SAS card, and the entire raid chassis is attached to that.  So I put the tape drive on my desktop with it's own SAS card.  The network is Gb, one switch.

I need to know if:

a) Acronis (any version) can make an image of an network attached Raid array

b) If it can output that image to tape

 

 

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Scott, I am not personally aware of any Acronis products that are capable of writing to tape.  I think that this is now very rare given the abundance of cheap disk storage options of Terabyte capacities.

I would recommend contacting Acronis Support directly with this question in case any of their business products might offer what you are looking for.

With regards to RAID and the Acronis Home products, it only sees the RAID array as a single drive and backs it up as such, assuming that this is how the RAID controller presents itself too.  If your tape can present itself as a mapped network device or share, then you should be able to write to it, as you would any other network device.

On an aside, I have a box of old Verbatim DC2120 QIC-80 120MB tapes from when I had a Quarter-inch tape cartridge device - long since gone to the scrapyard.  I tried offering the tapes on eBay a while back with no restriction on price and got zero interest!

Ditto to contacting techncial support / pre-sales and ask them directly.  If Windows can see the network attached storage, you should be able to backup the array, even across the network though.  I believe that you'd be looking at one of the Acronis backup 11.7 / 12 products and should be able to get a trial version of the correct one (after speaking with support) to test it out as a viable option.

I know that Retrospect does both features you're asking for as well (backup network attached storage and tape backup support), but my experience with that product has not been very well recieved so I can't really suggest it, but you can consider it yourself.  Forr what you're wanting to do, I believe you'd need the more expensive server license for that product as well, which is quite a bit more than a home/pc license.