[lug] Backup system ideas

[Dean Brissinger]

> From: Brian Rodriguez [mailto:brianr01 at yahoo.com]

> backups for 30 years, or even 10 years. Tape based backup remains viable
> (in
> some markets anyway) because the cost per gigabyte is still significantly
> lower
> than disk. If you can afford a disk based backup that holds enough data

One reason to go with tape is that it is still the industry standard.  Most
backup applications do not have massive in-field experience with
backup-to-disk.  Hard disk backups cannot be easily rotated or transferred
off-site (heavy).  Plus hard disks are less reliable than tapes for
long-term storage.  Still, a robust disk environment with a high speed
off-site link and a local disk backup is hard to argue with.  Also the new
tape libraries that have built-in hard disk caches are pretty slick (most
recently accessed backup sets are kept on disk).

Personally, I use hard disk backups for my laptop and whatnot.  Maybe when
USB tape drives cost $80 I'll think otherwise.  :-)  That said, I've lost
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.