[ILUG] Cheap tape drives

[kevin lyda]

On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 09:10:36AM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting kevin lyda (kevin at suberic.net):
> > however, i've had over 10 years of "backing up to disks is not backing
> > up."  it seems to me though that tape tech is not keeping up.
> It isn't, is it?  Not unless you have a lot of money for DLT, AIT, tape 
> libraries, and such.

i really don't see tape jukeboxes as scaling.  i see them as a kludge.

> Duplicating onto additional hard drives could be satisfactory in a way,
> if you have the drives on hot-swap trays.  Otherwise, the same thief or 
> fire that nabs the main system gets the "backup".  Part of the point of 
> tape backup is not just durability but also the possibility of off-site
> storage.

of course.  an alternative is to have a backup computer in another house
nearby behind 10 surge protectors using wireless ethernet.

> And, of course, hard drives _seem_ cheap and practical until you
> consider not just the hot swap problem but also the fact that it doesn't 
> scale economically to multiple generations.

ah, but perhaps it could solve that problem better.  each partition could
be a cvs vendor branch.  or you could use diff/patch (i think there are
versions of each that handle binaries).  with *bsd you could consider
union mounts + rsync.

i don't run my 75g disk at full usage after all, and the bulk of it
doesn't change.

kevin

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