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Rich Braun Wrote: >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. To say I back up a whole TB at the moment is a bit misleading, the server max capacity is a TB. Currently only 408 GB is used, but goes up rapidly. I estimate by the end of the project it will be very close to a TB. We are a video game company. We do at least 5 - 10 builds a week of uncompressed media, code and all art assets. Each build at the moment is around 600 MB (ex. since jan 1 we have had 8 builds). Every little change needs to be backed up. Early on in the project the server had a melt down and we lost about a month's worth of work. That situation definetly changed our backup strategy. Now with a server meltdown we only lose maybe a few hours or at most a few days worth of work. Richard Borgatti Database/MIS Stainless Steel Studios <http://www.stainlesssteelstudios.com> Rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com <mailto:Rich at stainlesssteelstudios.com> -----Original Message----- From: discuss-bounces at blu.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at blu.org]On Behalf Of Rich Braun Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 3:01 PM To: discuss at blu.org Subject: Re: Backups was Restoring MBR - Solved 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. So why is it that corporations are hungrily gobbling up storage just because hard disks are so cheap? Are they failing to discard the trash that users tend to pile up? What's being backed up here, and should it be backed up at all? Hard disks might have a one-time cost of 50 cents a gig, but implementing a proper backup facility has a recurring cost of a lot mroe than that. How many companies take this into account? And are they doing proper backups, that allow for quick disaster recovery and the ability to retrieve a crucial file someone accidentally deleted 9 months ago, one that's need to file this year's taxes? I could go on... Pruning the archive is essential. Getting users to eliminate useless or potentially-incriminating data is also important. -rich _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss at blu.org http://olduvai.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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