Matthias Johnson wrote: > I know several people must be involved in backups so I thought I might > pose this question. What backup media do you / would you use for a > business? I know there has been some that have stopped using tape > media and now do backups to disk but is this a smart approach. To > quote the O'Reilly book PC Hardware in a Nutshell by Robert Bruce > Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson.
I can only speak for myself, but away from books, out in the real world, tape and the people responsible for using them are the #1 cause of backup failure. If disks were really as bad as they're trying to suggest, nobody use them for _primary storage_, but we all do, don't we? I started switching clients to disk backups about 5 years ago. They have gone from highly unreliable backup systems based on tapes that often verified but could not actually be read when needed, and people that weren't changing their tapes, to a backup system that has been there for them 100% of the time they need to recover something. Please note however, that people are still the main point of failure. Unless you automate offsite backup as well, you're still going to be relying on people to rotate external drives on a schedule that meets the needs of the situation at hand. During my financial industry days, you could rely on people to handle backups correctly because it was often their only job to do. In my small business days however, the task of rotating drives seems only to get done if the owner/CEO/CFO or some other top rung executive personally does it themselves, and getting to the point where they'll do that usually requires discovering that even threats to fire people will not get them to perform their backup duties competently. - Ron _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Oct 6 - Creating Browser Extensions for Firefox and Chrome Nov 3 - Open Source Hardware: Bugs, Beagles and Beyond Dec 1 - IBM's Open Client Deployment
