> It doesn't hurt that large IDE hard drives are dirt cheap when compared > to something like DLT.
At NBER, where I do contract perl programming, we noticed this fact, and ended up developing a disk to disk backup solution that has some nice features, which we are hoping to put out as open source for others to use and expand upon. I guess it's in the "beta candidate" stage right now. We have not annouced it publically anywhere, but you can look at the preview version here: http://www.nber.org/~aminoff/d2dbackup d2dbackup copies files from a source filesystem to several backup disks. NFS is used as the network transport. It's more sophisticated than rsync in that it preserves multiple old versions of files. We have some clever algorithms for adaptively and dynamically deleting some older versions in order to make room for newer ones, so that the whole system tends towards a balance where the maximum amount of valuable old information is kept. Other features include the complete lack of a database of files (you just go look in the filesystem using unix commands), and minimal hardware requirements (no RAID controllers, Just a Bunch Of cheap IDE Disks) I intend to use this at BaseSpace.net, replacing the DDS-3 tape drive I bought for $700 two years ago. - Alex Aminoff National Bureau of Economic Research --- Send mail for the `bblisa' mailing list to [EMAIL PROTECTED]'. Mail administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]'.
