On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
Karsten M. Self wrote:
Tape.
I've never really used tape drives, but my one experience was not good.
Someone else backed up data to a tape on a mid 90s unix machine, I think. I
needed the data about a year ago. We were unable to access the data because
we were clueless about how the tape was formatted, what software utility
wrote to the tape, etc. The computer that wrote to the tape was long gone.
From this experience, it seemed that there is no standard when it comes to
tape formatting, reading, and writing. Has this changed? If not, they don't
seem that useful to me.
Jonathan
The place I came to work had a dying $5,000 tape deck that they couldn't
afford to repair, and 80 GB tapes that they couldn't afford to replace
because they cost about $80 each, and they were dying after a year or two
(probably because the deck was bad, but they were replacing these tapes
after a year anyway as standard practice). We ended up using spare space
on several servers for the backups, which has been much less work and more
reliable. My longer-term proposal was to buy a pile of 200 GB hard drives
for about $80 each and have backups performed and rotated automatically.
As far as reliability, these hard drives could be stored unpowered - or in
a massive RAID-5, the functionality would be monitored in real time, and
the chance of a double drive failure affecting a periodic backup that
happened to be needed seems remote.
Yours,
Chris
_______________________________________________
vox-tech mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
