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Backups was Restoring MBR - Solved



miah <jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com> (and others) don't like tape:
> for the low low cost of $1000 I can have a complete backup
> solution.  Sure. I'd rather just buy a 200gig drive for $100 and do
> some rsync madness.  Yesterday, newegg was doing a $70 for 200gig
> deal.  Thats a much better deal than a used autoloader ...

A disk drive can't compare to a tape autoloader, you're comparing apples to
oranges.  (You could compare a tape autoloader to a rack of disk drives
mounted in those removable slide-rail thingies that alas aren't cheap enough.)

You need at least two disk drives (in external enclosures or slide mounts) in
order to accomplish a reasonable backup rotation, IMHO.  So 2 times $70
(assuming you can find an external at that price, generally I see them at $100
or so) can be compared to an internal-mount AIT drive (about $80 to $100 on
eBay) plus 2 to 5 blank tapes.

Hence the low-budget AIT solutions that I've implemented cost about $100, not
$1000.  The bigger-budget ones (based on autoloaders so you don't have to
touch them for a month at a time) cost about $500.

My argument is simply that hard-drive backups aren't as cheap as they seem,
and they are a lot less flexible in terms of media rotation because the
incremental dollars-per-gig in the archive is a lot higher.  But they do make
sense if your needs differ from mine (perhaps you need to keep a lot of
incremental dumps and recover data a lot more frequently than I do, and rotate
off-site a lot less frequently.)

But I've said all this before:  go read the BLU archives.

-rich





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