How Home Backups Should Be Done(tm) Was: [lug] Tape Drive Recommendation...

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2000 at 12:12:46AM -0600, Alan Robertson wrote:
>apart.  To really appreciate tape, you need a jukebox.  To make good use of a
>jukebox, you need lots of disk...

The sweet spot for the home user is if they can get a "refurb" tape changer.
Right, Kevin?  ;-)

We might be a bit unique in our usage because we've converted all our CDs
to MP3s.  However, the point is that 60GB drives are dirt cheap these
days, and you can't get anything less than 10GB very easily these days.

>SCSI drives are a good bit more expensive (and a somewhat more reliable).  HSM
>has actually been pretty useless for about 10 years - because tape needs to be

Yeah, I haven't thought of it for quite some time.  Unless you're running
a REALLY big operation, that is.  I mean, with DDS4 you can get 20GB
uncomrpessed on a $30 tape.  So for around $20k to $30k you can get around
a terabyte of storage on DDS tape.

>Another thought:  Is this an opportunity in the days of cheaper bandwidth for
>people to provide offsite disk storage accessed through the internet?

That's exactly what I suggested to dusty.  Find a friend, you both get
DSL, and run backups over it.  USWest was offering a service for doing
that years ago -- I haven't heard about it in a long time.  I don't
even know if it's still around.

>Maybe electronic vaulting is a new opportunity for tummy.com ;-)

It's not something that we're really looking at except for the clients of
our hosting service.  The problem is that backing up THEIR data to a remote
tape drive can be a pain.  So, I'm working on some rsync-like technology
for doing incremental backups to a remote box's 60GB $250 hard drive, and
from there it's spooled off to tape just like it was local (because it is ;-).

Sean
-- 
 Got Source?
Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python