[nflug] backups on an nfs server ..on and on

[Mark Musone]

As richard said...

We don't use tapes at work, and for good reasons. Disks are four times as fast as tapes, 1/2 the cost,
and twice as reliable. Not to mention, they are extremely portable and cross platform (try stickig a tape into
just about any machine...and ever more important, even if you happen to find an extra tape drive, try actually getting
the tape to read sucessfully). not to mention having random access to disk data makes restores actually feasable.


Tapes are OK for archiving. For backups, they've definitely outlasted their usable lifespan.

We treat disks _just_ _like_ tapes. Every action you do with tapes, we do the same thing with a hot-swap backup drive.
A lot of people sit there and say "oh, well how do you do _this_ with a disk, that we do with tapes..." We do the same thing with disks. All we do is replace the media, the backmup software, processes, procedures..etc..all remain the same.

-Mark


On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 06:00:58AM -0700, Richard Hubbard wrote:
> Big question... why tape?  It's slow, amazingly unreliable, and very expensive.
> 
> Consider these tape drives (no tapes... just the drives)
> http://www.tigerdirect.com/Applications/Category/category_slc.asp?CatId=291
> 
> Now consider these combinations
> First a  hard drive, for about the cost of a tape (not the tape drive, just the tape)
> 
> http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=8
> 
> next, an external enclosure...
> http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?Recs=10&Nav=|c:1204|c:2213|&Sort=0
> 
> so you could get a bunch of external, "usb"  hard drives (which is also automatically recognized by most distributions of linux) that is fast, inexpensive, and actually more reliable than tape. 
> If you are worried about damage due to dropping, etc. Tape cartridges are just as vulnerable as hard drives, and since the medium in a tape cartridge is exposed to open air, is more susceptible to just dying of old age.
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: eric <eric at bootz.us>
> To: nflug at nflug.org
> Sent: Wednesday, August 9, 2006 8:23:06 AM
> Subject: Re: [nflug] backups on an nfs server ..on and on
> 
> I'm going to have to find an external scsi tape drive that is comaptible
> with linux, the one that I was using with what used to be a win2000
> server seems to be only semi compatible with linux it is an external
> scsi Dell PowerVault 110t
> 
> I am able to rewind the tape but cannot write to it, I think Cyber was
> having the same kind of problem with an LTO??
> 
> 
> Robert Wolfe wrote:
> 
> >
> > On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, eric wrote:
> >
> >> Cool, my server works great and it's really easy to recover files
> >> ....then I discover that my home dir is 60 gb and my network server has
> >> only 170 gb of space, definitly not enough room for a mon-fri bkup.
> >>
> >> Isn't their a way (through tar) to delta files like in SCCS? Is it
> >> called increment?
> >
> >
> > You could do a backup with tar and then burn the resulting tar file to
> > a DVD-ROM.  But to save space and store more data, you may want to
> > gzip the tar file after it is created.
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