John Drescher wrote: >> What is the best strategy and storage media for long-term backups, say >> to 10 or 20 years (if any)? I ask because I do have an old DLT tape >> drive and some tapes, unusable, because its SCSI controller is no longer >> among us. It is not 10 years old and is already a problem. >> >> > In bacula provided you have a drive that reads the old media do a > migration to new media/tape technology when you determine the > availability of a technology is going away. I have 80 DLT tapes with > bacula data on them but both of my DLT IV drives are unreliable at > best. When I get time I need to invest $600 in a new DLT (only can buy > from "approved" vendors) so that I can do this for my old data. Most > of this is a second copy of archived data that I have a working copy > on the LTO2 autochanger. I know that is getting old but at least it's > still supported in read mode with LTO4..
Which points up the basic issue. Long term archiving is a labor intensive process. You can't just take something and toss it in a safe and expect it to last forever. There has to be managed migration, testing, etc. You could use disk drives, but you need to keep upgrading them and testing them. So the drive you have the data on in 10 years won't be the same drive it started out on. I have backups dating back almost 20 years on disk drives. They have moved through multiple actual computers and many changes of OS. Another issue with old archives is data format. Same story. Labor intensive. Old formats become obsolete. Files may need to be translated or updated. Details will vary depending on the data and application. For me, it made it reasonable to buy a copy of MacLink Plus Deluxe to get the various old document formats into more current open formats that are usable, since it can handle a huge number of old formats and does batch conversion. But that's personal data. Professional environments and those with much larger data volumes will have different needs that will have to be addressed in different ways. It's the digital version of the monks of the middle ages copying manuscripts and distributing them to other monasteries, where they get copied and distributed again. -- --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <hoogen...@bio.umass.edu> --------------- Erdös 4 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
