[Gllug] Tape backups

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Adrian McMenamin
<adrian at newgolddream.dyndns.info> wrote:
> Given that my tape (DDS4) takes four hours plus to bzip2, tar and write
> to tape 16GB of data, I am wondering what, if any, the advantages of
> backing up to tape, as opposed to (now very cheap) disk might be?
>
How important is your data?

How much money do you have?

For the home user it is perfectly fine to backup to disks. Buy 3 of
them, mirror 2 for resilience and backup to a third external one for
recovery purposes (the difficult part of the process is one doing this
periodically). Credit crunch version: no mirror, backup *religiously*
to the external disk.

SSDs are coming, or disks will get bigger, or a technology shift of
some kind will come sooner than we think (holographic storage
perhaps?), so by the time any of such technologies are affordable you
can move your home data to the new medium before all your drives brake
or become obsolete.

Small businesses can get away with disks only, but they need more of
them. A single external copy of the data is simply not enough, and one
of the copies of the data should be held in a different physical
location from where the company's computers are.

In medium and big sized businesses tape is always used for longer term
archival (rule of thumb is for data older than a month or more)
expensive media and tape changers are normally used. The resilience of
the data is guaranteed by disk arrays, SAN (storage are networks),
some NAS (network attached storage), clusters, file system snapshots
and disaster recovery procedures and drills.
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug