[ILUG] backups using Harddrives

[Kenn Humborg]

On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 09:51:07AM +0000, Donncha O Caoimh wrote:
> I read an article in PCW last night about backups and it advocated using
> removable hard drives as a backup medium, pointing out the advantages
> (low cost per MB) but also the disadvantages (break easily, the fact
> they have to be backed up in the first place is telling).
> The advantages win IMO "if you're careful" but I was wondering if anyone
> has used such a backup medium, and how do removable hardrives work
> anyway and will they transparently work in Linux as long as you "umount"
> them first?

All the cheapo removable hard drive kits I've seen require you
to power down the machine first.  Otherwise, you'd need some
sort of hot-swap kit, and I'd imagine that they're not cheap.

As a pure _backup_ medium, hard drives are OK, but  they're
useless as an _archive_ medium.  

And if you're thinking of buying a few spare drives for backup
then you'd probably be better of RAIDing them for fault-tolerance
and making real use of the disk space.

Again, when designing a backup strategy, you have to first consider
why you're backing up.  Is it to store financial records for legal
reasons, to cover you against the occasional rm -rf /, cover against
drive failure, complete PC failure (due to fire, or being 
killed by another computer -- see item 0 at 
http://world.std.com/~bdc/projects/vaxen/vaxgeektop10.html), theft, and
so on.

And as removable media, drives suck.  You don't see anyone shipping
tapes in anti-static bags, inside in foam, in cardboard boxes marked
fragile!

Later,
Kenn