[lug] OT: Tape Drive Rental

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 03:46:22PM -0600, Zan Lynx wrote:
>don't want to put in my plan: "Wait for Joe's Computer Parts to deliver
>tape drive in 10 days...if it's in stock."  After such a disaster I

The only thing I can think of is to use a data recovery service.  They
will take the data from the tape and burn it to a hard drive, which they
then ship you.  They can often get that turned around quite quickly, if
you're willing to pay the bucks.

It's incredibly expensive, much more so than buying another tape drive,
but on the other hand it is much less expensive if you never have a
disaster of that magnitude.

Personally, we have switched to using IDE drives for backup media.  It
can be read on pretty much any computer, has tons of storage (a full
backup of the machines at our server facility takes around 110GB), and
is relatively fast.  We have removable drive carriers that hold the
drives and then just transport a few copies from the on-site backup
server to off-site.

For our laptops, we're doing backups to the backup server at our
facility using rsync running across the net.  That also is fairly
convenient.

Sean
-- 
 It is far from clear whether "good intentions plus stupidity" or "evil
 intentions plus intelligence" have wrought more harm in the world.
                 --- Domer, The Logic of Failure
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>