On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 12:37:14PM -0500, D. Keith Higgs wrote:
> Up sides: you can get as broad or fine grained as you want and you have
> the ability to impose user quotas.  Use a little bit of clever scripting
> and you have a means of rotating backup files so you only keep the most
> recent ### complete backup cycles.
> 
> Down sides: I haven't thought of any yet.

Down sides:

If you're using "little bit of clever scripting" to "rotat[e] backup
files so you only keep the most recent ### complete backup cycles",
that seems to imply that you're only using a single NAS device rather
than swapping them daily/weekly/whenever.  Putting all your backups on
a single physical medium (whether a single tape or a single disk) means
you're hosed if that medium fails.  Also, this would mean that you are
less likely to have an offsite copy of your data (the NAS could be on
the other end of a WAN, WLAN, or whatever, but that's less likely than
having tapes in a safe-deposit box), which leaves you vulnerable to fire,
flooding, riots, meteors, etc.

Now, if you have multiple NAS devices and rotate them offsite to a safe
location and all that sort of goodness, the above issues go away... but
then the question of relative durability comes into play.  (Powered-down
drives are pretty durable these days, but I doubt they match tape.)