Backups was Restoring MBR - Solved

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

   Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 15:01:00 -0500 (EST)
   From: "Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net>

   Rich Borgatti <rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com> wrote:
   > I have a TB of Data to back up and tape was too slow to do alone and auto
   > loaders too expensive.

   Agreed, if you have a terabyte or more then disk is the only way to
   go, at least until some alternative medium arrives on the scene.
   Tape may or may not be it, I'm thinking maybe the tape companies
   might switch to a cheaper/faster HDD-based cartridge solution a la
   the "Bernoulli" thing from the 1980s.  The challenge is to get the
   price-per-gig of archive down to something reasonable: if you want
   to keep a long history of dumps, it's prohibitive to keep a file
   drawer full of hard drives.

   I'm posting here, though, to query why the heck a company needs to
   store a terabyte or more of *anything*.  My home system has a tenth
   of a terabyte, mostly music files.  Companies don't need to back up
   music (unless they're in that business) and generally don't need to
   back up video.  Customer lists, financial data, source code and
   that sort of thing simply don't require that much space.

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.  Think about however many billions of
transactions we're talking about every month.

You'd be surprised (or maybe not, if you reflect on it) just how many
companies need to store transaction data, or want to mine all of that.
And that's only one kind of data.