[vox-tech] [fwd] backup solutions for 3 people

[Chris Jenks]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Jonathan Stickel wrote:

> Karsten M. Self wrote:
>> 
>> Tape.
>> 
>
> I've never really used tape drives, but my one experience was not good. 
> Someone else backed up data to a tape on a mid 90s unix machine, I think.  I 
> needed the data about a year ago.  We were unable to access the data because 
> we were clueless about how the tape was formatted, what software utility 
> wrote to the tape, etc.  The computer that wrote to the tape was long gone.
>
> From this experience, it seemed that there is no standard when it comes to 
> tape formatting, reading, and writing.  Has this changed?  If not, they don't 
> seem that useful to me.
>
> Jonathan

   The place I came to work had a dying $5,000 tape deck that they couldn't 
afford to repair, and 80 GB tapes that they couldn't afford to replace 
because they cost about $80 each, and they were dying after a year or two 
(probably because the deck was bad, but they were replacing these tapes 
after a year anyway as standard practice). We ended up using spare space 
on several servers for the backups, which has been much less work and more 
reliable. My longer-term proposal was to buy a pile of 200 GB hard drives 
for about $80 each and have backups performed and rotated automatically. 
As far as reliability, these hard drives could be stored unpowered - or in 
a massive RAID-5, the functionality would be monitored in real time, and 
the chance of a double drive failure affecting a periodic backup that 
happened to be needed seems remote.

   Yours,

     Chris