On 7/21/2011 10:46 AM, Mark Dennehy wrote: > On 21 July 2011 15:29, Chris Ess <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > This is true of any physical backup mechanism though. Whether it's > drives, tapes, etc., it will be an added expense and off-site > storage will be an additional hassle. > > > Yes, that's true - but tapes are smaller and lighter than entire > enclosures with multiple harddrives and PSUs (or even just the drives). > Even LTO-5 tapes aren't *that* bulky or heavy...
This is true. There are some small USB external drives which are more portable but the largest I've seen for these is 1 TB. Once your data exceeds that, you'd need to carry around multiple drives and this may remove the portability benefit. >From a portability standpoint, I agree that LTO-5 wins. I'm just not certain that the expense is justifiable, at least for me. The cheapest LTO-5 drive I see on Newegg is about $2,000 with tapes at $70 each (although possibly cheaper in bulk). Assuming $200 per external 2 TB eSATA drive (drive + enclosure) and that LTO-5 tapes are only used to store 2 TB of data, LTO-5 would be cheaper at about 16 tapes. (Assuming 3 TB per tape, that would be about 13 tapes.) --CAE _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
