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. > 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. > On 8/1/07, Orlando Andico <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > that only PRINTS OUT the filenames. a real verify would say confirm > > that the md5 checksums are correct on each file inside the tar. > > > > On 8/1/07, thad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > tar -tvf file.tar Drexx Laggui; CISSP, ACFE Associate, CSA, CCSI; Singapore /Manila /California http://www.laggui.com (computer forensics, pentesting, QMS & ISMS developers) PGP fingerprint = 6E62 A089 E3EA 1B93 BFB4 8363 FFEC 3976 FF31 8A4E _________________________________________________ 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
