On 8/1/07, Drexx Laggui [personal] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 01Aug2007 (UTC +8) > > On 8/1/07, ian sison (mailing list) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Again, my tirade against tape drives. > > > > DO NOT USE TAPE MEDIA FOR IMPORTANT BACKUPS! > > > > With tape media you will never know if your backups are indeed > > reliable when the time comes and you need to restore from them. > > Tropical climate makes the tape media vulnerable to fungus, so unless > > you store your tapes in a climate controlled room.... > > I have important, but not critical, tapes stored in a shelf in a > non-airconditioned room in my home, since 2002. It still works. > Typically, tapes last at least five years (normal expectancy is 10 to > 30 years). A friend of mine, who works for a data warehousing firm, > will call me up later to give me more accurate numbers, so I can > update you all. >
Granted, some people are luckier than others. :) But more modern technology exists so i wouldn't dare trust tape drives for storing my data. > > What to use instead: > > > > Hard disks are cheap. You can get 500Gb SATA/IDE drives and bind them > > with Linux SW RAID 5 or RAID 6. This gives you a cheap redundant > > network backup server which you can easily rebuild if one or two > > drives fail. The nice thing about hard disk drives is that when one > > fails, you will know - syslog will tell you, or in the case of SMART > > enabled drives, it will report failures way before the actual drive > > will die, giving you time to replace it. > > > > Also, with disk based media, you have the opportunity to use > > intelligent backup software like rsnapshot/rsync instead of just blind > > dumping of a tar.gz. > > From the Linux "The Software-RAID HOWTO" > http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-10.html#ss10.2 > > "Remember, RAID is no substitute for good backups. No amount of > redundancy in your RAID configuration is going to let you recover week > or month old data, nor will a RAID survive fires, earthquakes, or > other disasters. > > It is imperative that you protect your data, not just with RAID, but > with regular good backups." > > RAID can't protect you from "rm -rf / &". Or what if a malicious > insider tampers with the database? RAID will happily store bad data. > Only backups can restore good data from a known good date. > Nice quote. However the context here is using RAID alone on a production system without a backup. Using RAID as means for backup means that depending on your RAID level, you already have a duplicate of your data, and if you use modern backup software like rsnapshot, you will even have MULTIPLE copies of your data. More details on http://www.rsnapshot.org. As for off-site backups, There are removable hard disks, and hard disks you can mount on removable trays which you can remove from a RAID mirror, exchange with another drive to facilitate a GFather-Father-Son offsite backup system. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
