Home
| Calendar
| Mail Lists
| List Archives
| Desktop SIG
| Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU |
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
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups | |
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities. |