[ILUG] tape autoloaders and Redhat

[Wesley Darlington]

Howdy,

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 10:15:20AM +0000, Conor Daly wrote:
> Got a query from one of our IT people.  He wants to use a tape autoloader to
> keep 2 weeks worth of tapes available and to backup a series of redhat boxes
> onto this tape set.

I'm always a little bit amazed that people buy autoloaders so they can 
leave the tapes in them for weeks on end. Why not just get a machine
with $n$ 80GB ata hard drives and keep $N$ days worth of backups on
that instead? 

As I see it, tape is good when (i) you want to physically get your data
the f*ck out of the building as early and as regularly as possible and
(ii) you plan on filling so many *different* tapes that the cost per byte 
of the media and drive, amortised, start to make some sense.

It just seems to me that leaving the same set of tapes in the autoloader 
for weeks on end at the very least defeats both of these. I hope the
autoloader isn't stolen along with the machines it was backing up...

ATB,
Wesley.

PS. Sorry for ranting. The rapidly increasing cost and equally rapidly
decreasing capacity of tape *relative to hard drives* irritates me...

PPS. Seems to me that big, slow ata hard drives in ruggedized cases with
firewire or usb 2.0 interfaces are going to be the future of backup. The
way things are going, hard drive space is going to be cheaper than (say)
dlt/ultrium. Per byte and per cartridge, never mind the cost of the tape 
drives.