I think the bottom line for this discussion is really that you first need to define your requirements as well as what you are going to back up, what are the security constraints. How often do you need to restore individual files, and in the case of a catastrophic failure, such as a head crash, how fast can you recover. Another issue is the quality of the backup. If your backup is corrupted, then it is useless. Another case is how often to backup. This can affect how much data you can afford to have to recreate after a failure. In a commercial situation you also may have a legal requirement to save files for a number of years. Once you list your requirements, then you can set your strategy and eventually choose the method and tools. I also prefer a backup to disk because that drive will most likely be available, but in the case of things like a surge or fire, any attached device can be fried, so you might want an offsite backup. In my office we backup to an attached Western Digital 2TB (RAID1) system. The device is very, very slow, but meets our needs. We also backup to New York every night, and New York backs us up to tape. If our building burned down, we would be able to fully recover home and important working directories, although they would be about 2 days old. This works for us. But, the nature of the business dictates the needs.
-- Jerry Feldman <[email protected]> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
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