The best scheme for backups I have heard of is something that I have
heard with any type of document you want to archive, Multiple
copies in multiple places. The more copies and the more places you
keep those copies the better off you are.
With the costs of HD's it is so much easier to keep two to three
externals and make backups and rotate them.
I worked hardware support over a decade ago for a company and one of
the biggest complaints we had when some ones system went south was I
want to restore my backups. OK where are your tapes?
They would get their tapes and we would try a restore to only find
out their tapes were blank or corrupted. OK where are your other
sets of backups (We encouraged a rotating set of backup tapes) If
they had been diligent in keeping backups and had rotated the tapes
like told we could usually get them back up and running with only a
day or two of data lost.
Still not a bad philosophy.
Stewart
At 11:07 AM 9/9/2008, you wrote:
> That is the point that most people are dealing with today, and that Tom
> keeps emphasizing.
>
> If the likelihood of a computer failure is close to the
likelihood of a disk
> drive failure, how do you minimize the risk?
That's the thing. In my experience, the system will fail many, many
times less often than will a hard drive. All Tom has are
throertetical numbers from drive mfrs to back up his claim. My real
world experience shows a very different result. And you minimize the
risk with backups, at least at the most basic level.
> It used to be that disk drives failed ten or a hundred times more
often than
> computer systems. But now they are roughly equivalent - hard to determine
> which is more likely in general.
No, they aren't. Hard drives win the failure contest. Hands down.
> So spending even $200 on a RAID controller and the same on extra disks just
> for RAID, is probably not the best way to minimize risk to the small
> business today.
Who keeps extra drives around? I have 5 year warranties on my Dell
servers and they have the parts. If I keep a system past the
warranty, it's a non-mission critical system and there are scads of
spare parts available.
Again, this is balancing risk vs. cost vs. priorities. It's not a
simple equation and every business is different, not to mention, every
system. But you keep arguing with me as if I think replicated
servers are a bad thing. I've made it very clear that they aren't, in
fact they are quite valuable and I wish I had them. But, they are
also very, very costly compared to a RAID array.
What will give me a middle ground is a data replication system that
will also have bare-metal images of servers that can be restored to a
virtual machine if needed, with real-time data snapshots for critical
systems. That still is $$$, but nothing close to the cost aand
complexity of a replicated server environment.
Rev. Stewart A. Marshall
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Prince of Peace www.princeofpeaceozark.org
Ozark, AL SL 82
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