Backups was Restoring MBR - Solved

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:45:24 -0500
   From: "Grant M." <gmongardi at napc.com>

   Robert L Krawitz wrote:
   >    I'm posting here, though, to query why the heck a company needs to
   >    store a terabyte or more of *anything*.  
   > 
   > Think about a financial services company that issues credit cards, and
   > they need to store data on every single transaction for years.  They
   > *absolutely* need that backup.  

   We actually have a large number of clients with MUCH more than a 
   terabyte of data. These are some of the largest advertising agencies and 
   print/media houses in the world. With high-res photography and artwork 
   costing thousands of dollars each to produce, and images ranging in size 
   from 50megs to 500megs each, this adds up quickly. Most of our customers 
   have at least a TB of data online, multiple TB nearline (in the tape 
   library), as well as multiple TB offline (tapes on a shelf). The only 
   practical solution are LTO or AIT-4 for disaster recovery and AIT-3/4 or 
   DLT for nearline/offline storage.

Agreed, 1 terabyte is small change these days.  There are a lot of
different ways of reaching this scale of data size, be it high
resolution photographs, video, detailed transaction data, denormalized
transaction data (to speed up processing), geophysical data, etc.

And I agree about photographs -- high resolution scans really do take
up a lot of data.  I have a Nikon Coolscan V ED.  At 4000 DPI and 16
bit depth, 35 mm scans are typically in the 110 MB range; medium
format scans at that resolution would be in the 500 MB range or so,
depending upon the precise format.  6 megapixel JPEG files have their
place, but there's a lot more to digital photography than that...