[lug] OT: Tape Drive Rental

[Zan Lynx]

On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 13:57, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> 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

Thanks everyone for the advice.

I've decided the best idea is to buy a backup tape backup drive.  It's
only a Travan, and I priced the drives at $170.  If it was a $3,000
drive, that would be different. :-)

Using IDE drives for backup is another great idea, and I've tried to
convince my boss that a nice external USB drive would be a good backup
idea.

The rsync idea is a good one, and I've been doing that for a while. 
I've made a snapshot server, which creates hardlinks of yesterdays files
in a new directory, then rsyncs against that.  That lets me keep 5 days
of backup in only 1.5 times the space.  It also means I don't need to
bring out the tapes whenever someone wants a file they deleted.
-- 
Zan Lynx <zlynx at acm.org>
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