On Thu, 6 Sep 2012, David Parter wrote:
As an aside, I would pedantically point out that traditional backups are not a
disaster recovery tool -- they are an operational recovery tool. DR has a lot
more involved, including replication, offsite services, infrastructure
replacement/rebuilding, etc.
Sure. it depends on how you define "DR" and the scope of the disaster
that you are planning to recover from (site burned down? a single disk
failed? oooops I didn't mean to erase that disk?).
Backups are not a complete DR solution, but the purpose of backups is
to allow for data recovery after a disaster. It is not an
archive.
Archival has other requirements -- like long term reliability, and a way
to name or otherwise identify what the archive is. Other than that, I
don't know what the requirements are... but I was hoping to get some
ideas from the discussion (whcih I am).
I think the line between 'backups' and 'archives' is very fuzzy, backups
sometimes also serve as archives (otherwise, why do you retain more than
one backup?)
I think the only statment you can make to reliably differentiate them is
that the 'archived' data is expected to never change (although, you may
end up maintaining multiple 'archives' of a given data set for different
points of time).
In either case you need reliability for however long you expect to be able
to read the data.
In either case you need to name or identify the data (with backups you
frequently just name it as "server X on date Y", but it's still a name)
In either case you need to identify what you are protecting against (do
you need the data geographicly distributed to survive a fire or other
disaster, or is it good enough to just have a copy on-site)
The length of time that you are talking about holding the data will really
drive the technology side. Archiving the data for 3 years is a completely
different thing than archiving the data for 30 years. As the time gets
longer, the hardware issues mentioned by others become more and more
critical.
I've heard statements (very possibly urban legends) that the blueprints
for the Satrun V rocket are "archived" on tape, but there are no systems
able to read the tapes and no software to interpret the resulting files.
Is this really an archive?
David Lang
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