[Nottingham] Tape Backup Systems

[Martin Garton]

On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 14:58 +0100, Michael Simms wrote:
> The question I have these days is - WHY would anyone use a tape drive
> any more!

In general I would agree for a lot of users.

> Use a hard drive, its quicker, its cheaper, you dont have to keep
> remembering to change tapes. If you need to have offsite, just put
> things onto a USB stick which is faster and cheaper than buying all
> those tapes.

For some people, usb sticks are not big enough and hard drives are too
fragile to risk taking off site (as demonstrated by the personal
experience of at least two lug members so far)

> Personally I simply backup using rsync to a remote server. It does a
> good job of backing up about 50GB of data at low bandwidthes and
> requires NO human interaction, it just does it for me and I dont have to
> care or remember to change tapes/discs/sticks. Remote servers arent
> cheap I agree but Im sure that the LUG could set up something like a
> backup ring where 2 people offer each other accounts on each others
> systems and you backup to each others machines, giving offsite backup to
> both at no cost...

The backup ring is an interesting idea.

Alternatively, for smallish amounts of data, sending to ones own gmail
account is a decent offsite backup.

I think someone wrote a fuse or gvfs or kio-slave or something for gmail
at one point.  That might even make it integrate with your existing
backup scripts.

-- 
Martin.

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