John and Rodney both have good points, but if you're seriously going to dig up the backups in 7 or 10 years, why not only have DVD snapshots from once every six months (or so) and then throw Very Large Disks (tm) in an old clunker and point rsync at your important directories for more frequent backups? Disks aren't so expensive that replacing them every three years (or so) would pose a tremendous hardship. You could even get crafty and set up the backup box to do wake-on-lan:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/net/wakeonlan So you don't suck power when not doing backups. Also, the output of smartctl inspires confidence for me in a way that DVDs do not, but that says more about the way I treat optical media than about backup strategies. :P Or you could skip most of the above and pay for some off-site storage space. Point rsync at somebody else's colo'd server. So I guess what I'm really saying is that I agree with others that a backup strategy that involves you not touching the data for 20 years isn't really a viable strategy. I am not an archivist, but there you have it. -CMP On 11/26/06, Rodney Radford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ummm, I still have an 800 bpi 9-track tape as a 'backup' of some old files from NCSU when I left my undergraduate degree... I guess I am probably in trouble, eh? But the best answer is that if you really care about what is on the DVDs, or any format, is to transfer them over to new formats/compressions as they come along. That way your media and file format are always 'current' enough. If you don't transfer them, or remember them, then perhaps you didn't miss them (like the files on my 9-track tape). >>I'm considering backing up to bzip2 instead of gzip (.tgz) to >>pack more on a single DVD. <end snip> >Steve, you are missing something here. In 20 years you will not have a >device that is capable of "reading" a DVD. (That assumes that the >plastic disk is still in working order also.) > Not counting one in the closet, do you still have a 5 1/4" flopply >drive on your PC? That is 20 year old technology. The IBM 3.5" flopply >came into being only 19 years ago: >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2 > I don't even want to think about all those 20 years old back-up tapes! :) -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
-- Cristobal M. Palmer UNC-CH SILS Student -- ils.unc.edu/~cmpalmer TriLUG Vice Chair "There are many roads to enlightenment, and thus many roads back to the One True Debian" --crimsun -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
