On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, Fred Ab wrote:

If your place burns down you are not just down but out of business. Tapes are tangible and can be stored offsite.

Disks are this way as well.

Tom

===}From: Bennett Todd bet@rahul.net ===}To: toasters@mathworks.com ===}Subject: Disk-to-disk backups? (was Re: Need new backup solution) ===}Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 13:13:15 -0700 ===}Mime-Version: 1.0 ===} ===}I'm curious about something here. ===} ===}First, some background. I recently set up a backup system I really, ===}really like. It's on a Linux fileserver, no netapps in this ===}picture. It's backing up c. 60GB of disk, a single root drive and a ===}50GB RAID-5 with a hot spare, to another RAID-5 set, about 130GB, ===}with no hot spare. I have a cronjob set to email me if a drive drops ===}out of the set. I backup with a script that replicates all the ===}data to be saved onto the backup raid set, using rsync, with the ===}--backup-dir option to save anything that's been changed or deleted; ===}then it takes all those changed-or-deleted files and bzip2s them ===}into timestamped archives. When the backup partition gets over ===}90% full it commences deleting those bzip2-ed archives, starting ===}with the oldest, until it's back down under 80% full. This gives me ===}months of coverage and I never have to change a tape, and the cost ===}of the drives is less than the cost of a suitable capacity tape ===}drive to back up 60GB of data. ===} ===}So anyway, enough with background, the question is, how come I don't ===}hear anyone advocating using Netapp's snapshots as a backup ===}strategy? Netapps don't lose data; it's not like WAFL or Netapp's ===}RAID or any other bits are so bug-ridden that they don't do their ===}job. ===} ===}And you can buy a _Load_ of drives for what a heavy-duty ===}industrial-strength DLT jukebox costs. Especially when you factor ===}in the setup time, and the re-setup time every time it breaks. The ===}Exabyte 8200 was the only tape drive I ever set up that didn't die ===}before I switched jobs; seems like MTBF for a drive writing a tape ===}a day is well under a year, at least in my experience in the last 6 ===}years or so. Bleech. ===} ===}-Bennett