[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 01/16/2007 03:37:09 AM: > Timothy J. Massey wrote: > > > BackupPC's pool is stored on a large internal hard drive. Every > > day at > > a little after 7:00 A.M., the backup server starts an archive of each > > host, which is stored on a second hard drive that is mounted in a > > removable tray. Once this is complete, the user can shut down the > > server, remove the hard drive, replace it with a different one, and > > turn > > the server back on. Once the new drive is in place, it is > > repartitioned, reformatted and remounted in place, ready for the next > > archive. > > Won't the frequent reformatting et al. wear out your hard drives > pretty fast?
How is a couple of formats going to wear out a drive? I did not go into further detail, but now I will: 1) As opposed to the article you linked, this is on the *backup* server not the *file* server. It's *supposed* to work real hard, so the file server doesn't have to. 2) There are three removable hard drives that are swapped weekly, not daily. Therefore, they are only formatted weekly, not daily. 3) Like any media, the drives are scheduled for replacement. Every 3 months, a drive is archived permanently. That means that no drive lasts for more than 9 months in production, of which only 3 months are spent spinning. Assuming 4.33 weeks a month, each drive gets formatted exactly 13 times. 4) As much as I would like to do a full surface-scan of each drive when I format, there just isn't time to do that on a 500GB drive. So, these are merely doing "quick" formats. If a drive can't handle *10* minutes of extra drive activity every week, then why exactly are we using it for backup in the first place? 5) While doing a daily archive *might* be slightly harder on the *internal* hard drive, which does not get swapped, can you think of a better way of achieving off-site storage of the backup data? I'd love to hear a better way... There were *so* many more problems in the article you linked than the fact the drive had to rebuild daily: the fact that a desktop hard drive died after working for *years* in very high temperatures doesn't sound very unreasonable, does it? The fact that someone depended upon *that* for their data storage is the problem, not the fact that the drive had to spend an hour or two a day copying itself, in a nice, linear non-seeking way. It's not like the drive would have stopped spinning during that time... Again, I ask everyone: does anyone have a better solution? I have heard only two solutions to the off-site storage issue. 1) Do an archive to some sort of removable media. Given the storage requirements, I don't see how it could be anything *other* than a hard drive. If you were going to spend four figures to buy a big enough tape library, wouldn't you use it for backup directly? Or 2) create some sort of RAID-1 configuration and break it regularly to swap out a drive and store it off-site. Someone even recommended a 3-drive RAID-1, so the data stays redundant, but you can still break the array. It doesn't change the workload on the array, however... > Network administrators who fear the command line... What is the world > coming to, eh? A sad, but profitable, conclusion? Tim Massey ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
