[H-GEN] DVD+RW media for backups

[Robert Brockway]

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On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Greg Black wrote:

> But, as always, this is an individual decision.  I was sure more
> people would weigh in and I don't plan to say a lot more about

I've been reading with interest.  I use (and advocate) portable harddrives
as a reliable alternative to tape.  I am fond of high end tape
technologies (DLT & up) but not too fond of low end tape technologies
(such as DDS & Exabyte) due to reliability issues I've seen.

Certainly maintenance (and testing backups on the same tape drive &
other tape drives) can go along way to ensuring reliability but I've found
that for low end backup needs portable harddrives are reliable, fast and
store _a lot_ of data.

I currently use 2 portable harddrives of 80GB each to backup my personal
data (that I value very highly).  I'll shortly be adding a 3rd drive.  At
least one drive is offsite at any given time and I rotate the drives so
that the same drive is not on site for consecutive backups.

I use a staging area to keep a local copy of backups and then rsync this
to update the offsite backups (the portable drives) when they are on site.

For the drives themselves I use an IDE drive in a Firewire casing.

The drives are robust (one of them used to go between work & home in a
backpack while I rode my bicycle).

The MTBF (mean time between failures) of an IDE drive averages about 5
years.  The MTBF of DDS tapes is much shorter than this.  A talk by Jason
Andrade at Sage-Au suggested the MTBF of a DDS tape itself is about 12
months.

I've had drives in service for >3 years using this regime and are yet to
see the slightest problem.

There is more on this topic in the archives for those who want to look
further as we've had this discussion once or twice before :)

As for software I use a custom script which is designed to exactly suite
my needs (nothing like a home cooked dinner eh? :)

Greg is spot on about backups being an individual decision.  There is no
such thing as a backup solution that suites everyone, or even most people.

> The thing about backups is that, like insurance, they are just a
> drain on your resources -- unless you need them.  Unlike normal

Hell yeah :)  I've been backing up my home boxes religiously for years. I
needed (and I mean _needed_) the backups for the first time recently. I
was so thankful I'd put the time in over the years.  The data recovery
took a few hours (there were GBs to recover :) but it wasn't stressful, it
was just a mechanical process of following my restore procedure.
Fortunately the onsite backups were all I needed, but if they had been
damanged too I could have picked up one of my offsite drives and restored
from that.

Every few weeks I see people posting on lists (even Sage-Au) asking for
info on how to recover from an accidental rm -rf or mkfs or asking for
recomendations about professional data recovery companies.  Anyone feeling
the need to ask for assistance on recovery after a disaster should have
been doing backups.  Learn from other people's mistakes and start backing
up today if you aren't already.  Do this even if you care only a little
about your data.  Make it an offsite backup too :)

I've only spent about $600 on my personal backup solution.  Money well
spent if you ask me.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
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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