On 6/17/2002 12:03 PM, "Lee Larson" <LLarson at Louisville.edu> wrote:
> > On Saturday, June 15, 2002, at 03:18 PM, Jane25345 at aol.com wrote: > >> > Hello All! >> > >> > Well, here I am, confronted with choices as to how to back up my >> > information >> > (about 20 GB) the cheapest, yet most reliable and versatile way. >> > > Stuff deleted... > >> > Sooooo....what do all of you use to answer this problem? Inquiring mind >> > wants >> > to know... > > We've spoken about this before, but I don't know whether I've given you > my full sales pitch. > > Your method of backup depends a lot on how much you value your > information and time. I value both, and I'm willing to spend the extra > money on tape. Here's why. > > 1. Backups should be something you don't think about too much. That's > why things like CDs and Zips are out for me. If I have to sit there > feeding the hungry monster every few minutes during the backups, then > I'm likely to put it off until tomorrow. > > 2. Backups should be redundant. I don't want just one backup on a hard > drive; I want several going back a few weeks in order to do a > restoration from before a problem occurred. This makes a hard drive less > appealing because managing multiple backup sets on one hard drive can be > tricky, and if I drop it, all my backups instantly disappear. > > 3. I want to store a master backup away from the computer. This rules > out using one hard drive. > > My strategy is the following. > > I have five tapes in play. > > One is a master backup that I write to every month or so and after I've > made major changes. I make sure all the programs and system files are on > this tape. These don't change very often, so I don't need to back them > up every day. Besides, this is the easy stuff to restore because I've > got the original install CDs. The master is kept in a safe place. > > The other four are for the data, which is the hard stuff to restore. > They are numbered 1-4 and get cycled once per week. Every morning at > 2:00, the script kicks in. On Thursday morning, it erases the tape and > backs up all my data files. Every other morning, it does incremental > backups. I change tapes every Wednesday. > > This incremental strategy will even work with a relatively small tape > drive. You can put the master on several tapes and squirrel them away. > The rest of your stuff is current data, and most people don't have more > than at most a few gigabytes of that. > > Lee > > PS/ Also, when I checked eBay, the very first tape drive I looked at > today was a 35 GB (90 GB compressed) SCSI Sony drive for $240 or so. > There are others like this. How big a drive do you need? > > <http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2032230776> > > > --- > Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville > Phone: 502.852.6826 FAX: 502.852.7132 > > > The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be June 25. > For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of > activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>. > > Well, let?s stir this pot a bit . . . I have many a customer who cursed the first tape drive they ever bought. Needless to say, they?re not using them anymore. They have struggled with tapes that won?t read, won?t write, won?t format and won?t restore properly. Personally, I have found tape backup to not be as reliable as back up to hard disk or optical. On the other hand, technology changes and improves and that blanket statement won?t fly for a lot of folks out there. Tape drives have been the de facto standard for many years when backing up file servers in a network environment. I?m just not a big proponent of tape drives when used in a home environment. Look how easy (and FAST!) it can be to restore files from a hard disk vs a tape. Even with Retrospect, you can back up files in a Finder accessible format to a hard disk for maximum ease of restoration should you lose something. OK, so using multiple tapes in your backup scheme is the proper thing to do. What keeps you from using mulitple firewire hard disks in your backup scheme? And when comparing overall cost, lets not forget the cost of the required tapes and backup utility to boot. A redundant hard disk with a little ?synchronize? utility may be all the home user needs. Ward Oldham (oh, boy . . . here we go!) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20020617/9920192c/attachment.html
