Richard P. Welty writes:
a couple of gig, not really all that much. the problem is that there is an expectation of one or more persons/organizations going through due diligence on the operation, and i'm not sure that a fuzzy "somewhere online" file storage service will pass the smell test for many of them, where as physical tape cartridges stored offsite will likely make them happy.
I think you should worry much more about getting the procedure done right over making somebody happy.
Some of the problems with tape systsems, in my humble opinion, are: 1- More often than not there isn't a second tape unit somewhere to use in case the physical location where the tape unit is, becomes unavailable. Having tapes offsite is useless if you don't have a tape unit handy to put the tapes. Also not only you need a tape unit, but you also need whatever program was used to do the backups to tape. 2- If and when the tape unit dies you need to have a backup scheme until you get the unit repaired.
3- Restore tests are usually not done enough to make sure the process is actually working. You would be surprised how often people have a system they believe works.. to only find out at restore time that it had been failing for a long time.
I suggest you look into a multi-stage approach. One form of backup tape and a second approach such as a second machine where you usually do restores. Amazon's S3 can also be a good second location.
Just today I was taking a glance at python code to use S3 and looked pretty simple. I would, however, encode the data before sending it to S3.
Best of luck in whatever method you choose.
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