News Group Posts

using removable hard drive for

backup

From: Anthony Lawrence <tony@pcunix.com>
Subject: Re: sco-list: Re: DVD-RAM
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 13:24:50 -0500
References: <3e05e9aa$0$1396$2c3e98f8@news.voyager.net>
<H7JHMo.ypn@wjv.com>
<au7100$1kl$1@pcls4.std.com>
<20021223095319.B13584@barryg.mi.celestial.com> 

Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 07:53:19AM -0500, Anthony Lawrence wrote:
> ...
> 
>>The advantage of dvd-ram is price and longevity.  IDE DVD-RAMS are 
>>getting very inexpensive and even the top of the line (with capability 
>>to write CD's in addition to DVD-R* ) are under $400.00.  Low end units 
>>are under $200.00.  DVD-RAM media can be over-written for years and 
>>years - they say 100,000 writes and a 30 year media life.  That's 
>>"forever" for most of us.
> 
> 
> BackupEdge works very well with DVD-RAM.  Their FFR (Fast File Restore)
> feature is virtual IFR (Instantaneous File Restore).  There are limitations
> of course in that everything has to fit in 4.7gb, but with Edge, that may
> be extended by file-by-file compression.
> 
> 
>>At the present time, if you have more data than you can compress to 4.7 
>>GB (in the field I see that as typically around 9 GB), tape is obviously 
>>the way to go.  Another reason you might need tape is speed: DVD-RAM 
>>isn't blindingly fast on writing - say about 3GB an hour for the units 
>>I've used.  Otherwise, I wouldn't use tape - this is cheaper, and far 
>>more reliable.
> 
> 
> We're looking seriously at getting away from tape and DVD style backups
> entirely, and using removable hard drives in their place.  We're
> prototyping a system here which has a Mandrake 8.2 Linux box with external
> ieee1394 (FireWire) 120GB hard drives (sorry SCO/Caldera 3.1.1 Workstation
> doesn't support ieee1394 reliably and I haven't received my UnitedLinux 4.0
> yet :-).  The external chassis and drive were about $200.00 at CompUSA, and
> I have a similar LaCie 120GB on my PowerMac G4 that I paid $350.00 for
> about six months ago.

The problem with that is that you don't get deep backup - you can't go 
back a week, a month, a year.  I think it's great if it is combined with 
archival backup that can be taken off-site.  It's completely 
unacceptable by itself.

Unfortunately, I am seeing this sort of thing promoted more and more. 
As I said, it's great as long as there is also tape or dvd-ram in the 
picture.  Without that, somebody somewhere someday is going to be very 
sad that they made this choice.  I wouldn't do that for my own data and 
strongly discourage anyone from it.

I recommend to my customers that they keep at least a full week worth of 
tapes/cartridges and rotate one out monthly, keeping at least two months 
back (and more is always better).  I can't tell you how many times being 
able to pull up a month old file has saved the day.



-- 
Tony Lawrence
Free  Linux Skills Test: http://aplawrence.com/skillstest.html

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