On 2008-10-17 15:23, Greg Troxel wrote:
Gene Heskett <gene.heskett AT verizon DOT net> writes:
On Wednesday 15 October 2008, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:44 AM, Seann Clark
<nombrandue AT tsukinokage DOT net> wrote:
The other alternative I am looking into is getting a large external case
and cramming it full of 1TB hard drives and using that as backup, but I
would like a tape system that works well.
This option is worth considering. HD's have many fewer moving parts
than tapes/drives. Even if the "critical failure" rate is similar,
the "annoying failure" rate of tape drives is much higher. Which is
to say, they require a lot more fiddling.
Dustin
I'll back Dustin up on this one. Switching to a hard drive got rid of 99.9%
of by backup problems. It Just Works(TM).
--
Cheers, Gene
There is certainly merit in the hard drive approach, but you can lose
two critical properties if you aren't careful:
full backups offline (not writable by computer) even while making next
full backup.
full backups taken to a remote location
I solve these issues by doing backups to an external harddrive.
USB-2 works reasonably fast, if the amount of data is not too large.
I will be experimenting with eSATA "real soon now".
One of the ideas I have is to make a mirror with LVM of my vtapes
to an external disk for offsite storage.
I have been using LTO-2 for several years and have had little enough
trouble, although I can't remember if it is very little or zero. Before
that I had DDS-3 and that was occasionally annoying but not that bad.
I am firmly in the tape camp at least for corporate use.
But actually, I still use LTO-2 for offsite storage for our main
office; it's only in 2 small offices abroad that I implemented
backup to external USB disk.
That disk gets exchanged on friday each week, and stored offsite.
Using the USB subsystem makes the server (also small) rather unresponsive.
Only workable in the weekends and nights. I hope eSATA will make
better use of system resources.
--
Paul Bijnens, xplanation Technology Services Tel +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/ email: Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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