[lug] Backup system ideas

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 03:24:22PM -0600, Dean Brissinger wrote:
>One reason to go with tape is that it is still the industry standard.  Most

Which format tape is an industry standard?  One of the killers of tapes is
that you really need to have two drives available, and the drives tend to
be extremely expensive.  How long can you stand to go without the data if,
for example, a lightning strike takes out your server and it's peripherals,
including disc and tape drives?  If you don't have a spare drive, you could
be down days or more before a replacement arrives.

The benefit of hard drives is that every backup includes all the mechanism
required to pull the data off the tape, except for a computer.  Finding a
computer with PATA or SATA is incredibly easy.

>backup-to-disk.  Hard disk backups cannot be easily rotated or transferred
>off-site (heavy).  Plus hard disks are less reliable than tapes for

I don't know about how difficult it is to rotate them, but they certainly
are more vulnerable to ESD and physical damage.

>backups 3 times to disks kept on a shelf.  Don't confuse the MTFB of a usb
>or firewire disk with that of a SCSI or Fibre Channel disk.  And always
>choose a disk that has been in the field a long time.  The big 100G+ disks
>that are coming out are not all defect free.

YMWV, of course.  I've had very good luck with the robustness of PATA and
SATA drives I've deployed, and there have been quite a few of them over the
last few years.  A new PATA or SATA drive probably has better reliability
than a high end SCSI drive designed 5 years ago.  Considering that most
SCSI drives today still seem to be based off 5 year old designs, I'd wonder
exactly how they stack up in real life situations.

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
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