Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2004, Johannes B. Ullrich wrote:

> IMHO, tapes are just too expensive. Overall, I am switched almost
> exclusively to backups to disk/CD/DVD. Tapes may be an alternative if
> you already put the money down for a big auto-loader. But hard disks,
> which now drop below $1/GByte, are very attractive.

Yeah, but hard drives are fragile things, and optical media (cd/dvd) tend
to be read-only (a minor point, I know -- yes I've heard of cd-rw). Newer
media formats may have fallen below tape in cost, but are they proven to
be as reliable as plain old-fashioned tapes yet?

Hard drives always seem to fail within a few years, and there have been
suggestions that CD-{R,RW} won't be reliable beyond five or ten years.
Tapes are fragile too, but if cared for reasonably well it seems like they
can work for decades. Will that be true for hard drives & CDs?

I'm curious how far you've thought this through. The appeal of backing up
to big, cheap hard drives is obvious, but do you really trust those drives
to be around when you need them? They seem too fragile to me...



-- 
Chris Devers