[plug] Tape backup solution?

Bernd Felsche berfel at innovative.iinet.net.au
Tue Aug 19 23:28:42 WST 2008


"Keith Bawden" <keith at bawdo.com> wrote:
>On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 19:58, Fred Janon <fjanon at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Since a thread was started on RAID, I was wondering if someone
>> knows where the tape backup solutions are now. What the tapes
>> capacities are and what approximate cost for the drive and the
>> tapes. I am doing backups on CDs and DVDs but I cannot backup
>> entire drives anymore.

>Tapes vary greatly in size and price. Up to at around 400 GB per tape
>for LTO-3 (I have not used anything larger myself). However, tapes are
>generally quite expensive.

>A cheaper alternative for home use might be to invest in an
>e-SATA/firewire/USB type setup. You can play around with some udev
>rules and have a backup job auto kick off on hotplug.

>I have seen 1 TB SATA drives go for around AUD 250 or so. This is
>substantially less that the cost of single LTO3 tape and the required
>drive (and SCSI controller if needed).

>The draw back with backing up to hdd is that you will more often than
>not leave the backup medium on site after each backup. In the even of
>a fire or whatever you will loose everything...

Perhaps even lose it.

Buy several external drive units. Take one to site in the morning
and take the one from the previous night offsite when you leave.
The maximum loss will be 2 days if you forget at the worst possible
time.

It's the same procedure as taking tapes offsite.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ /  ASCII ribbon campaign | Science is the belief in
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