building a RAID system - yup - superglue

[Alvin Oga]

hi ya robert

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Alvin Oga wrote:
> 
> > 	- will never touch a tape backup again ... too sloow
> > 	and too unreliable no matter how clean the tape heads are
> > 		( too slow being the key problem for restoring )
> 
> C'mon, Alvin.  Sometimes this is a workable solution, sometimes it just
> plain is not.  What about archival storage?  What about offsite storage?
> What about just plain moving certain data around (where networks of ANY
> sort might be held to be untrustworthy).  What about due diligence if
> you were are corporate IT exec held responsible for protecting client
> data against loss where the data was worth real money (as in millions to
> billions) compared to the cost of archival media and mechanism?  "never
> touch a tape backup again" is romantic and passionate, but not
> necessarily sane or good advice for the vast range of humans out there.

yup .. maybe an oversimplied statement ... tapes are my (distant) 2nd
choice for backups of xx-Terabyte sized servers..
	disk-to-disk being my first choice
	( preferrably to 2 other similar sized machines )

	( it's obviously not across a network :-)

i randomly restore from backups and do a diff w/  the current
servers before it dies ..

> Pants AND suspenders.  Superglue around the waistband, actually.  Who
> wants to be caught with their pants down in this way?

always got bit by tapes... somebody didnt change the tape on the 13th
a couple months ago ... and critical data is now found to be missing
	- people do forget to change tapes ... or clean heads...
	( thats the part i dont like about tapes .. and is the most
	( common failure mode for tapes ... easily/trivially avoided by
	( disks-to-disk backups

	- people get sick .. people go on vacations .. people forget


- no (similar) problems since doing disk-to-disk backups
	- and i usually have 3-6 months of full backups floating around
	in compressed form

c ya
alvin

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