The reality is that if you really need reliable data for 10 years you're probably stuck with technology like paper, optical media (choose wisely as many of these formats are gone too), or online hard drive space that you'll be continually checking and carrying along with each upgrade (and backing up with all your regular fulls). All have their own major drawbacks. The benefit to online hard drive space is that new data needs grow so fast that in many cases it's not that much more expensive to keep the old stuff around--for instance... 20 years ago 100GB of data was not available in one storage system. 10 years ago it was a lot but quite pricey. Now it's about the smallest hard drive you can buy new.
The odds that you can locate a working tape drive of any current (2007 hardware) type and adapters to plug it into 10 years from now (2017 hardware) aren't good the way things are moving. Not only will you have to worry about hardware--is PCI still going to go the way of the ISA bus by then?--but drivers for old adapters on the OS after the next OS are quite possibly going to be a problem--there's tons of useless adapters out there now where manufacturers went out of business before updating their NT 4.0 drivers to work with XP, Server 2000, and Server 2003, so even if you save both the tape drive and the adapter who's to say the adapter will have a spot to plug it in and a driver you can load. With regard to 30 years I can almost guarantee problems with just about any electronic removable media. While it's true that you can probably find a 9-track mainframe style tape reader to read 30 year old data tapes on many current computer systems, the market does not seem to be maintaining that trend for the current storage stuff--things are moving just too fast. That's been driven by IBM's mainframe dominance over the last 30 years--corporations have been migrating off IBM mainframe hardware right and left in favor of hardware from companies that may or may not still be in existence 10 years from now. In summary... backup software is extremely important for disaster recovery but should not be considered for long term (5+ years, possibly even less depending on what you need it for) storage needs in my humble opinion. > Message: 22 Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 08:06:29 -0400 From: "John Drescher" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> > but cheap hard drive keep your data safe only for 3 - 4 years for >> > sure (maybe longer) and some tapes (DLT, LTO) are specified to hold your >> > data for 15 - 30 Years (if the tape is not constantly in use, so for >> > archiving purposes). > > On top of that I have several other reasons why tape is better for > backups. We have 10TB of data online (linux software raid 5 and 6) > which represents between 1/2 and 2/3 of our data but we do not in any > way consider this as a backup. What happens if the file system > corrupts (I have seen this happen) and 1/2 of your data is lost? Hard > drives use power and require extras (servers/cages) that make the cost > of them a lot more than the price of a single drive. And they do not > scale anywhere near as well as tape. And you have to replace them > every 3 to 5 years or fear that you will loose your data. To avoid > some of these problems you could store the drives on a shelf (in a > temp / humidity controlled environment), however there is a big risk > here that the drive will not spin when you install it 10 years down > the line making the data on the disk very expensive to recover. > > John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
