On Wed, Oct 31, 2001 at 06:59:23PM +1100, Michael Lake wrote: > Andre Pang wrote: > > Yeah, I'm investigating this as well, and the best thing I can > > suggest is just buying some hard drives. I use a 40GB 5400rpm IDE > > Yes its cheap but its filled once you back up 40GB. Jill and I have > a Sony DDS Tape drive which stores 24 GB. Sure at the $ thats more > expensive than a 40GB HD but you can make so many backups with tape!
Well, if you do the maths, you'd have to start backing up _lots_ of data before the tape drive combo starts becoming more cost-effective. Consider that you can buy 200GB of hard disk (40GB x 5) for ~$1200, which is still _under_ the price of a single _12GB_ tape drive. Even if you throw in a hot swap IDE controller and all the removable drive bays, that's still 200GB of backup for the same price as the tape drive itself with only one or two cartridges. It really depends on how much data you want to backup, and what reason you have for backing up. I wouldn't care for backups more than a week old, personally -- all I'm concerned about is restoring my system in case of hard disk crash. Preservation of files I had a year ago and don't have now is not an issue. > Also as well as having 3 backups, say weekly, daily etc, if your > machine is fried by a lightening strike you still have yopur backups > on tape. Will that 40GB HD survive ? If it's out of the computer, it'll survive :) Thus the reason for a removeable hard drive bay. -- #ozone/algorithm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - trust.in.love.to.save -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
