02Aug2007 (UTC +8) Ian: For the sake of fellow listers who are wallowing in confusion but are interested in learning, please allow me to analyze your statements and understand where you're coming from, and so I can help clarify things a bit...
On 8/2/07, ian sison (mailing list) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On 8/2/07, andrelst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> small: I might say yes. A long shot. >> medium/large company: If you are the backup admin., i'll fire you. > > Medium/Large Company? Forcing me to use tapes for critical backups? > I'll quit first before you fire me. ;) > I'm not going to be responsible for implementing broken and old-school > policies such as that. It's not about being "old-school". I believe you mean well, but unfortunately you were over generalizing here, and thus losing context. Technology should follow business needs, not the other way around. And in business, it's all about being practical. 1TB HDD's cost about PhP 30,000 (that's PhP 30 per 1GB) and there's a backlog on ordering. I know, because I'm currently starting to build Solaris 10 x86 and Linux FC7 boxes right now, with 5TB's each (for RAID-Z and RAID-5 implementations, respectively). Meanwhile, tape for backup is approximately PhP 1,000 per 80GB per media. That's about PhP 12.5 per 1GB. And it's more readily available. On 8/2/07, ian sison (mailing list) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On 8/2/07, andrelst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Have seen 6TB of weekly full data every week. You want to stick 10 >> (500Gb HDD) new drives every week? > > If you have 6TB of critical data each week, then you're certainly in > the position to buy 60 1TB drives, and a RAID array which can contain > your critical storage, Expensive? Just how much do you value your > data then? And also how long will it take to restore 6TB of data from > a tape backup as opposed to restoring 6TB from a disk array? For most > businesses, downtime == losses. Would it still be a good day to be > tape backup admin then? Yes,"downtime == losses" but it does not mean that the IT department has an unlimited budget. Even for a technology company! Very large capacity RAID systems are only justifiable if you have a very short Recovery Time Objective (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_time_objective) I.e. "how long can we wait to restore data?". And even then, not all data is critical. For any other backup needs, RAID is simply not as affordable as tape media. Therefore, tape backups still play an important role for backups and archiving. On 8/2/07, ian sison (mailing list) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On 8/2/07, andrelst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> raid is not backup! Have said this 3 years ago, i'm going to say it >> again. Raid is not backup, it was specifically designed to protect >> data from hardware failures... not backups. > > Using RAID alone is not what I am saying. Your argument posits that I > am equating Redundant Systems (RAID) with backups. This is not true. > Using RAID _TO IMPLEMENT_ a backup policy is what > I have been saying. Glad you made that clearer now, Ian. Because what you originally said in full, is that tapes are very bad for backups and so never use them, but use RAID technology instead: ========================================================================= 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.... > > 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. ========================================================================= So in summary, what we're all saying is that RAID systems and tape backups are different, but not exclusive solutions, for different needs. 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
