Is pushing zfs backup to tape for long term redundancy efficient?

Question

Its quite expensive to move to tape, so for my setup, would it be efficient? Im looking for suggestions for efficiency towards either just building up my existing backup (SAN), and documenting it for ease of use for others, or combining that with adding a tape backup too, which others could just eventually replace out the SAN completely thereby eliminating the complexity(after i back out of managing).

So, I have a home file storage and share server(main home used win7 box) that contains 2 large extra drives, one is a User only drive containing only user specific files, and the other large drive is public files music/videospublic upload/download, all LAN accessible (shared by user credential).

Now this data is backed up somewhere. The backup is via freefilesync, awesome.. ITs backed up to the SAN, which is on a linux box. However, it's still fairly vulnerable(except in the likely event of a simultaneous failure of 1 backup and 1 primary drive during ANY 2 week span of drive failure recovery). This makes me nervous. I will beef up my backup to a raid 5/6 soon to alleviate that. So no longer a problem for single drive failure, but a problem would still exist for any other single point of failure of the linux box combined with a drive failure on the primary.

So i want to get rid of these vulnerabilities. They cause me to lose concentration in moments of need, and to be a bit haphazard when backing up data in a rush upon the 'single-point-of-failure emergencies`'

Im now thinking of something, to which i wanted to ask the community about. I believe that tape is still king, after reading up here on server fault. So what if i backed my SAN with a TAPE http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840108119 on some periodic schedule, or loop?

If i tape backup will i still need my SAN? Im thinking of leaving my normal backup system in tact, that is the Win box to SAN using frefilesync, and then backing up the SAN 4 times annually. Alternatively, does one suggest that is scrap the SAN, and replace it with tape? I think i would waste a lot of tape that way.

Now, if you have an opinion, would it change things knowing that my SAN was built on the highly superior ZFS file-system? Is it still necessary to tape backup once i have a RAIDZII setup?

scenario 1) A single bus bar failure, and my backup is offline, then when the win drive kicks off, i lose files in the downtime of the bus bar i think.. However, the tape backup didn't run anyway, or do i leave that looping, and now SHUT IT OFF?

scenario 2) a drive kicks off, no problem, i have redundancy now..

So suggestions here on a proper fail-safe backup policy? This is for PRICELESS family pictures/documents/geneaology etc.., and should lead to easier maintenance for my wife/extended family once i KICK off ideally.

Answer 1

ZFS is not a replacement for a good backup.
That being stated ZFS is awesome and to me dual disk ZFS in either raidz2 or better yet a stripe of mirrored vdevs, provided you had another copy (preferably another ZFS box) on another machine, preferably offsite would be sufficient. Tape does have its place as well and super long term is definitely among them and is something that your wife can easily send somewhere and have a copy made if the situation of you kicking came up pretty easily.

Maybe cloud might become an option provided the size of your PRICELESS pictures underpaces per GB disk price.

Answer 2

Don't the forget the non-zero risk of fire, theft, natural disasters, etc. Take a serious look at cloud backup services. There's a number of them that offer unlimited backup space (be sure to read the fine print to understand exactly what "unlimited" means though) for under $100 per year.

Compared to $2400 for a tape unit plus media, this could be an attractive option.

Edit: Look for something with continuous backup protection if you're concerned about "doing backups".

Answer 3

I think the days of tape have gone for this application. Tapes degrade over time, formats change, hardware fails, etc. If the data is that valuable then you should be prepared to back it up to something that has a greater chance of being around some time into the future.

Personally, I use Crashplan to backup my home ZFS-based NAS. The family unlimited plan works for me and all the devices in my house. There's something in the order of 1.8TB of data in the cloud. It took ages to make the initial backup, but the rate of change is not too great.

I also have a FreeNAS device down in my home office at the bottom of the garden that mirrors the NAS. That allows me to do a fast local restore if necessary.

As to the issue of what happens if you peg it: my wife's PC also uses Crashplan and I've written out detailed instructions on how to access everything.

OT: Incidentally, I've done this by creating a shared Evernote notebook that has a load of similar Emergency stuff in it. No passwords however; they are all stored in LastPass but my wife knows where I put a file card with my master password on it.