[H-GEN] Linux backup tool of choice

[Russell Stuart]

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On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 13:33, Stuart Longland wrote:
> Fair enough, but they're better than *no* backup capabilities.  The

If the person who owns the business / operation understands that he is
backing up until an unreliable piece of junk, that the drive will start
writing random data to the tape without any warning or hint of trouble,
if the person is prepared to restore the tapes on a weekly basis and
compare the result to a known good copy to see if it still has any good
backups, then by all means use it.

But if this will not happen, or if there is any danger of the person who
baby sits the dammed thing leaving the organisation, then don't use it.

I used to work for an software house that sold commercial apps to normal
business people.  We did not want to get involved with backups, so we
told the customers to organise backup hardware and software with the
vendor that sold them the computer.  Often they would get QIC drives -
Travan or the like, because they were cheap.  On several occasions hard
disk drives died, and with them so did years worth of business data. 
That included information about the next payroll, information about the
taxes owed, information about monies owned to them by debtors.  They had
kept several months worth of data.  They had followed the rules.  They
did what the computer professionals they bought the stuff off, told
them.  They did not deserve what they got.

If you are giving a backup system to non IT people, give them something
that works like other things in their life.  If boat has a hole, it does
not wait until you are hundred miles out to sea and then sinks.  It
sinks in the harbour, when there time to get out.  Most things fail like
this.  If you provide a backup system that uses an unreliable drive,
then do a verify that does a bit for bit check automatically after the
backup.  This is often hard because file systems are rarely static for
that long.  So instead use a better tape drive - one that reads the data
it has just written using a separate head.

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