[cnip]
I will beat on tape for backup. MY tape drive faithfully backed up once a week and I rotated 6 tapes to stay current. (MAC fileserver 80).
This is how all "tape backup sucks" stories start.
Then one day I arrived at work to find the fileserver unresponsive. I eventually powered down and found the disk would not boot and enough of it was corrupted to make the rest inaccessible. OK no problem, data is on tapes, let's reload OS--- done reach for tapeSomeone didn't verify the backup, same problem can happen with a CD. You must verify the backup was good or the backup could be a waste.
Oops--tape is unreadable
reach for two week old tape--Errrr gee that one is no good either
Tapes sent to data recovery service--well whattayaknow They charged quite a bit to give me the bad news that six years of work was lost.
The employer was too cheap to give me a separate workstation, so it was my six years of work that was lost. For the same reason, it was risky to try restoring from tape though I had always done one file a month. Anyway, the tapes were stretched and dirty and the drive was unusable.
Just like new CD's need to be bought for backups, new tapes must be also.
CD's (almost) are worthless for real backups. I backup around 300GB a night in just incrementals. Full backup is well over 3TB. CD's are fine for small data size backups, but that doesn't make tape backups bad. This is done with one tape robot, 2 drives, and amanda (only one drive is used right now because of a limitation in amanda).I have been burning CDs since that time, even when the burns were at 1X. Civileme
Once a Raid box died (one of the three power supplies caught on fire and burned up the disks). It happened at 6pm, we had everything back online from tape backup within 8 hours (with a spare Raid box). A total of 1.1TB of data was restored. Try doing that on CD! If each CD was 700MB how many CD's would I swap? well over 100. How long would it take todo a full backup to CD?
A fellow Sysadmin backs up 3-5TB in incrementals a day. 8 drives in 2 cabnets with 2 robots. All tape.
I know your talking about small backups when your say CD. However, if done properly, tape still wins. Such a small backup size can easily verify each tape for each backup.
Before you start beating on tapes, use better procedures for your tape backup system.
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Bryan Whitehead
SysAdmin - JPL - Interferometry Systems and Technology
Phone: 818 354 2903
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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