[H-GEN] Linux Backup

[Robert Brockway]

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On Fri, 9 May 2003, David Jericho wrote:

> Same could be said about CDs, hard drives, and other backup media I
> can think of.

Hi David.  Demonstrably, harddrives & CD fails far less often than tape.
DDS tapes don't reliably store data past a year & can only be written a
very limited number of times.  Harddrives typically last 5 years or more
and can be written hundreds or thousands of times.

> Not that I'm defending tape, but the problem appears to be there is no
> better solution.

I think there _weren't_ any better solutions.  The firewire drive I use
is robust.  A small business could get two of these and rotate so one was
always offsite.  Mine is 80G, today they each could be as large as any
single IDE drive (160Gb?).  My setup wass about $400 for the firewire
drive & $60 for firewire card.  I bet it is cheaper now.  I've been
happily using this backup mechanism for about 2 years.

One of the worst things about tape is head misalignment - when a tape may
be perfectly good but only the original tape drive will restore it.  Too
bad if the original tape drive dies in the same disaster that killed the
computer and made you invoke your disaster recovery.

I don't mean to say that tape solutions aren't _ever_ useful, but I
think that in many situations there are now viable (imho superior)
alternatives.

> After what's probably half a century of using tape, the ins and outs
> of tape are well known.

True - for better or worse.

> I feel using zip or the like to do an individual file is a bit weak as

It's a compromise.  You get some compression but don't risk a complete
loss of the archive.

Cheers,
	Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah

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