[ILUG] Cheap tape drives

[Ray Kelly]

On Sun, 17 Mar 2002, Rick Moen wrote:

> > So why use tapes anymore (if cost is a factor)?
> 
> Umm... because cost _is_ a factor?
> 
> Because you're not likely to find hot-swap ATA hard drives that actually
> work, and work in Linux (as ATA was never designed to support that
> functionality, and somebody's kludge du jour is rather unlikely to have
> kernel support)?
> 
> Because by the time you piggyback ATA hard drives onto an interface that 
> _could_ conceivably reliably do Linux hot-swap (IEEE 1394, Compact PCI,
> HotPlug PCI) with the experimental http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net/ 
> code, it's no longer inexpensive?
> 

I know that I'm re-stating someone elses point here (Niall) but it's 
importance can't be underestimated. It you drop the little blighter that 
has your (presumably important [0]) backups on it there's a pretty good 
chance that you mightn't be able to get the data out of a bounced disk.
whereas you will (unless you happen to drop it down a toilet or 
equivilent)with a tape. 

Part of the thing with backups is that you move the data /away/ from the 
system that they were taken from. if you're backing up to a disk in the 
same machine, an unfortunately placed rm -rf (among other things) will do 
some serious toastin of data & even potentially if the disk is in a 
different machine somewhere, this is still a  possibility (I'm not 
considering hot plug IDE as viable btw & IMHO the scsi equivilent is too 
pricey to be considered either.) 

an example of my situation
Every Tuesday Morning I leave 4 or 5 tapes out for a courrier to collect &
deliver to off-site storage, if this guy unexpectadly comes off his bike
(it's happened once that I know of) & he's carrying 250ish GB of my data
on disks what happens??? my data's gone to the bit bucket in the sky which 
takes one layer from my protection in the event of a problamitic server or 
careless user (usually the latter) do I want to risk that? I don't think 
so.

The bottom line isn't the cost of getting the data onto it's media but 
the cost of getting the data from the media as quick as possible. backing up 
to disk, I believe, just isn't reliable [1] & if you can't restore what was 
the point in spending any time & cash on a backup system in the first place. 

Remember, it's not the cost of the backups that's important. its the 
value/cost of the data lost & that's rarely small in the event of a big 
hickup & they're the ones that'll catch you!


	Ray ...

[0] why else would you take backups if it wasn't important that you were 
able to get your stuff back in the event of something going titsup.com
[1] though if you're using Exabyte Mammoth tapes you're on even odds as to
which is better