Hi,

25.06.2008 10:55, David Legg wrote:
> Kendall wrote:
>> Terry wrote:
>>   
>>> DVD writer for the cost of a couple of tapes and DVD for  ~AUS50c each.
>>> Chunk your data into 4gb or 8Gb packages.
>>>     
>> I started to disagree and figured out that that might make sense while
>> writing this. If I did that for all of my files, it would mean writing
>> to hundreds of DVDs when I did a full backup.
> 
> Tapes are nasty horrible devices!  They're expensive,

Only when you think about rather small capacities... once you need a 
few TB, tapes plus drive are cheaper than reliable hard disks.

> slow

A decent tape drive is much faster than a hard disk is today.

> and very 
> prone to letting you down just when you need them most (IMHO).

My experience is completely different - unless you talk about 4mm 
helical scan technology, i.e. DDS.

>  Not only 
> that but new (incompatible) tape formats seem to come out all the time 
> making archiving very difficult.

I disagree, again. Of course you have to keep a working drive for 
long-term storage anyway, but that's not much different for hard disk. 
You recall Syquest drives with 5,25"-cartridges that were in use a few 
years ago? You won't easily find a drive today to read your old media 
now... and I don't expect USB 1 will be around in a few years...

> For home use I'd recommend an external USB 500GB or 1TB device.

Here I agree.

>  Just 
> beware that some of these devices don't appear to be designed for 
> continuous use.

Yup... and they don't like to be handled roughly.

But that has been discussed in great detail only recently... see the 
"Why do people use tapes?" thread.

Arno

> I have a small Ubuntu Linux machine which, once a day, sucks the essence 
> out of various Windows based laptops on the home network.  I schedule 
> the backups during the day so that there's a better chance the machines 
> are on and connected (I haven't got it to delay a backup until the 
> machine appears online yet).
> 
> I chunk the volumes to 4.2GB in case for some reason I have to move them 
> using DVD... though that's never happened yet.
> 
> Just beware of a slight niggle with backing up some folders on a Windows 
> machine.  Even when nobody has used the machine since the last 
> incremental backup it still seems to backup a minimum of 1.6GB per 
> machine.  I guess this is because Windows seems to use a lot of large 
> files of which small areas get altered; resulting in the need to backup 
> the whole file.
> 
> If Bacula supported an rsync style backup that could somehow only backup 
> the bits of each file that have changed instead of the whole file that 
> might solve it.
> 
> Actually, without this feature backing up onto DVD would be very time 
> consuming as you'd have to put in a new one far more often than would be 
> practical.
> 
> David Legg
> 
> 
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-- 
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
www.its-lehmann.de

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