Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 07:43:03 +1000 From: Greg Black <gjb@comkey.com.au> To: cjclark@home.com Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tape drive Message-ID: <19990129214304.10992.qmail@alpha.comkey.com.au> In-Reply-To: <199901291501.KAA22170@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> of Fri, 29 Jan 1999 10:01:36 EST References: <199901291501.KAA22170@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com>
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> > For daily backups, you might consider a small number of large > > IDE drives. They'll be fractionally more expensive in the short term, > > but cheaper in the long run, and they'll certainly back up faster. > > The problem I have with this solution is that it seems that you are > putting all your eggs in one basket. If that backup fails > catastrophically, you lose _all_ your backups at once. Seems that you > would have to backup your backups occasionally. So, you're still stuck > with doing tapes or some other media for the backup^2. Indeed -- when the machine catches fire and the "backup" disks go up in smoke with all the rest, or when the bad guys bust in through your window and steal your machines, or when the crackers break in and trash your file systems -- you're dead in the water if you rely on extra disks in the same box. If the data on your machine(s) is important to you, then you need to use some kind of removable media for backup -- and you need to store the media separately from the machines. Even though I have not needed a backup for many years, it would never occur to me not to use tapes because the cost to me of losing all my work would catastrophic. Since my home machines are networked, I obviously keep backups of important data on various machines for quick retrieval in the event of need. But the tapes that are stored separately are the thing that lets me sleep at night. As always, you need to think through these questions, and to be careful not to accept somebody's guidelines without evaluating them in the context of your own goals. Sometimes, backups don't matter at all (except possibly as a minor matter of convenience) and in other circumstances they are critical -- and that's when you need to identify exactly what they are supposed to do for you. -- Greg Black <gjb@acm.org> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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