Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 08:03:55 -0500 From: "Brian J. McGovern" <mcgovern@spoon.beta.com> To: dan@jgl.reno.nv.us, hamellr@dsinw.com, grog@lemis.com Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tape drive Message-ID: <199901301303.IAA25857@spoon.beta.com>
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Sorry, I got side tracked on the discussion about drive failures and losing data.... Silly me, not thinking about rm. At work, we use cheap DAT tapes for day to day backups (I think like $400). Usually about once a week, I'll also cut a CD-RW with the critical things... CVS repository, home directories, web server pages, DNS databases, etc. You'd be surprised what gzip can do for compression of these types of files :) We usually can pull about 3 GB on to a CD. Usually, we don't store binaries and the like, as we tend to run "stock" applications (apache, et. al) so reconstruction on a totalled machine is usually an hour to reinstall plus another 20-30 minutes to mount and dump the CD back on to the disk. Cost on the drives (I use the Yamaha 4x2x6 SCSI) was like $300. CD-R blanks are ~$0.75 on the high end, and CD-RW media last I bought was about $20 a pop. Using tar/gzip/mkisofs/cdrecord, I've automated the erasing of the CD-RW, building of the tar file, creation of the 9660 image, and the burn. Takes about a hour and a half to backup 2.5 GB of data. We then (the next morning) mount the CD-RWs in the CD-changer, so our developers can recover their own lost files.... The only downside to this is the amount of transient disk space needed to build the intermediary steps (although you may be able to pipe it instead). At home, I exclusively use the CD-RW option, but I don't have nearly as much data to backup, but its cheap, and, to me, more reliable than tape. I, too, got burnt when the DAT drive I had bought for home use went bad after 13 months (the old "Right after the warranty is over story"). I just couldn't see shelling out another $600-$800 for a drive when it costs them like $50 to make it... After all, I can get 18.2+ GB SCSI drives for that. Why would I want a tape? -Brian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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