Chris Gutzmer wrote:
> Cat,
> I disagree with you - why you may ask? because this is a backup! Not the
> primary copy. The chances of your primary drive and your external drive
> crashing at the same time are pretty low
Having seen multiple RAID arrays pull a simultaneous fail, I have come
to distrust even them as a safe data holder. Maybe someday they will
come up with a non mechanical system which has a better safety rate but
for now optical is the safest storage.
Last year a shop doing CGI for a major release had their array fail and
they lost all their work, well over a year and several million dollars
worth went south for no clear reason. Much of the data was scrambled and
a total mess. Recovery cost them enormously (about $1k per gig for
several TB) and the time lost was not inconsiderable either. They had
considered DVD backup too time consuming but now lost over a month to
recovery time. Now they pull DVD backups of everything.
> Burning to dvd is very manually labor intensive process.
True, in a commercial environment at large volumes. However at home all
you do is start a burn and do wherever else you want and then switch
media if you need further backup. No real time wasted/lost.
> Plus you need to
> remember what you backed up and when or just back it all up every time.
I have different sub directories for backed up data so i always know
what is not safe and what is.
> there is a failure rate on your dvd's. I can remember once when I copied my
> models off to cd and as a test I went to copy them back onto my drive. I
> have several failures. Have you tested your copies on DVD this way? I have
> not done it in several years as I was very dissapointed with my results.
True, especially if you use junk media. However I use archival level
media only, even at home and have rarely had a problem. On the rare
times there was a CFC error the problem was the OS(Windows) and they ran
and copied fine on the Unix/Linux systems. The sole problems have been
failed burns, and those are rare and you know the disc is useless, so
there is no risk of accidental storage of a failed disc.
Being paranoid I reup my data every 5 years and have not had any losses
or fails whatsoever. Now my HD and OS based losses have been not
inconsiderable over the years.
One trick to getting a good burn is to use 1/2 or less the maximum burn
speed. It takes more time but is very unlikely to fail.
A while back I stumbled across some old CDs from my first CD burner and
they still read fine. However some of the programs were effectively dead
since their US no longer is used (at least not without more trouble than
the program is worth)
> My backups are now completely automated :)
I trust automated anything about as far as I trust my parrot (and I
don't have a parrot).
> Working in Storage Services for a fortune 500 company I can say that (our)
> standard practice dictates that only unchanging media should be written to
> optical media and periodic disaster recovery testing needs to be done.
True but then how many model files get changed? Besides periodic
testing is normal in the computer world because as well know nothing is
100% reliable
> We
> just phased out the last of our optical media due to problems with the
> testing and recovery performance (OSAR)
Then what do you use? We have considered Solid State Storage but have
not implemented it due to the still over high cost and mechanical
storage is just too risky and the chance of loss too high to use it as
the backup (you seriously do not want to lose a $20 million+ job to some
bug or glitch)For our mission critical storage we only trust optical
because we can not afford a failure.
cat
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