Another question : tape drive

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Nathan Meyers wrote:
> But anything less than full guarantees on bandwidth, availability,
> and reliability makes an offsite backup provider worthless. Even to a
> "hobbyist", the value drops very quickly if you can't completely trust the
> provider. Real data centers have high-reliability hardware, redundancy,
> backup power, physical security, and lots of other goodies that help
> make the service expensive.

And to this I add:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with DLT
cartridges barreling down the Interstate at 70mph."

As a long-time Internet entrepreneur, here's my 2 cents:  bag the Internet
non-solution, hop onto eBay and for that same $100 you'd pay each and every
month, spend it once on a decent used tape drive.

Look in the BLU archives for my postings last month regarding the AIT (35-gig
native) solution I set up on my own Linux box.  The software I use is called
Amanda.  Once you get it running, it's a set-and-forget affair, aside from
remembering to pull out a tape or two every so often to store offsite (at your
office, in your car, in a bank vault, at a friend's house, etc).  And of
course remembering to add into your backup scripts that snazzy new hard drive
you'll buy a year from now (and likely forget to backup unless you happen to
remember this discussion thread).

A summary of the hardware I put into my 6-year-old 333MHz server:

- Sony SDX-310C AIT-1 tape drive ($100)
- Adaptec AHA-2944UW differential SCSI adapter ($75)
- Differential SCSI terminator ($22)

I already had a SCSI cable lying around the house, I think those run about $30
at the local stores.  The above I had to buy online because they are pricey or
unavailable at Boston-area computer places (Microcenter and its ilk still
persist in hawking slow sub-10Gbbyte junk).  Ironically the reason for
choosing SCSI versus ATA is price:  there is a glut of used differential SCSI
hardware on the market, presumably because of corporate bankruptcies
unleashing decent-quality data center gear onto eBay.

Worth checking out if you're among the 95% or so of people who can't recall
the date of their last manual backup.

Regarding the launch of an online backup service:  I have not looked at the
profitability of existing companies (one prominent local one is Connected, of
Framingham) but if I were launching one, I would only expect to make a profit
serving medium to large enterprise customers, mainly those with customization
requirements.  That niche is already pretty crowded.  Small-biz and home
customers are expensive to support, and the amount of data you need to back up
on their behalf is not necessarily smaller--given that a typical consumer PC
comes with an 80-gig drive these days.

-rich