On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 09:42:57AM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > If your backup/archive hardware won't connect to the new computer, then > you'll need to migrate the data to new archive hardware first, then > migrate the computer to new hardware.
Yes, but then you might have overlooked something ... And hardware is only a part of the problem. > > 2.) I'm not so much talking about migration as about keeping data > > readable. Keep it on your disks or put it aside on some removable > > storage medium, then after 15 or 30 years, try to read it. Having used > > a mysql database to store the data doesn't make it easier to read it > > after 15 or 30 years. > > As far as I know, the only digital media that is designed to last that > long on the shelf without data loss is tape. Since tape technology > moves apace, you should probably archive a couple of tape drives along > with the data. Well, I used to have some tape drives when the disks were smaller, but I haven't looked into them for years. I always bought them used, and they were still rather expensive. Can you get a reliable tape drive, incl. some tapes, that stores at least 1TB per tape, for max. $200 now? > > Who would keep all the old hardware? And for what? And it's nothing > > you could rely on. > > Actually, I need old hardware. Newer hardware gives my wife headaches. Why is that? It limits her to very slow hardware which could be a problem sooner or later because the old hardware isn't up to the task anymore. It depends on what she wants to do, of course ... > controller. What I really need is an old 100 MHz or slower SMP server > with scsi. Or, at least, an ISA scsi card. You can still get that --- but for how long? > > How do you maintain 15 or 30 year old hardware? > > Carefully. Memory is still available for my 486. The biggest problem > for me is hard drives; they die and aren't made small anymore. Scsi > fixes that (since there are no bios issues with scsi). Yeah, SCSI is great, but it's not affordable anymore. What's the price for a 1TB SCSI disk now? Like $1500? And I'd need two because I don't put data on disks that aren't at least RAID1. I've seen too many disks failing for that. And look at the cables and terminators. You end up paying about $100 just to connect a few SCSI disks. I still have the controller and disks, but the cables got lost when moving. They'd be nice to have, though rather loud, but I didn't want to spend all the money on cables. You can get 1TB SATA disks for the price of the SCSI cables and the terminators ... In your case, you could have the computer for your wife boot over the network and run it without any disks. Put the sever for that at some place where it doesn't bother her. > Choose hardware in the first place that allows upgrade. E.g. scsi > drives instead of IDE. SCSI doesn't allow upgrades anymore because it's too expensive. > Also, do you really need the data to sit on a shelf for 30 years, or can > it be cycled to new media every 5 years? I keep it on the disks. I don't have a solution for making backups anymore. I'm going to need new disks soon, and I'm also going to need a second set for backups (still better than none) --- but I don't have the money for that atm. > There's something to be said for tarring to a raw disk partition (so > there's no filesystem to be corrupted), and putting the same data to > three different drives. Then using some data comparision utility > (there's a deb available, I forget the name) to choose the correct block > for every block of the data. This is far more reliable given three > partially corrupted data sets than e.g. raid where if a certain number > of blocks fail, the whole disk is marked bad. You want to buy 8 sets of 3 disks each for your dayly and monthly backups and an SATA controller that can do hotplug? That's about $2500 --- maybe you can get a tape drive for that kind of money. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
