<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Brian Wood <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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I've never had a DLT tape get eaten or otherwise fail.<br>
<div class="im"><br></div></blockquote><div><br>If only mere mortals could afford DLT tapes, let alone the drives. When the backup tapes cost more than the HDDs holding the data, it just doesn't make sense to use tape. <br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>
Drive-to-drive is certainly fast, but not all that reliable, unless you use<br>
multiple drives.<br></blockquote></div><br>It's about as reliable as any tape I've ever used, short of the high end "enterprise" tape systems. Combine HDDs with ZFS or other checksum based error correction (par2?) and you can get a decent backup system with them. And it's the BACKUP, so you don't need all that many copies of it. Most of my data loss over the years hasn't been from hardware failures, it's been from screwups with "rm" and friends. I use Snapshots to avoid that problem now, so hardware is the next issue. RAID helps with that. It's not a substitute, stuff I can't lose is backed up with many copies. However, the volume of data that really meets that description is pretty small. <100G for me. Easy to rsync to multiple machines in the house and I'm planning an offsite backup of some kind as well. Probably on a couple HDDs. I'll grab them and do a ZFS scrub on them once in a while to check for bit-rot. <br>
<br>I don't really back up my Myth video archive. RAID handles that, and if I lose it, it will suck, but it can be recovered from the original DVDs and such. I might start using some 2TB drives as backup disks. I'm still debating that. An E-SATA HDD dock sure makes that a whole lot easier to deal with. <br>
<br>It would sure be nice to have a cheaper way to backup our data, but no company seems to think it's a worthwhile market. And judging by the number of people I know that have accidentally deleted the only copy of a file they can't replace, that would fit on a CD-R, they are probably right. Even at a decent price point, would people actually buy them? If people won't spend the time to burn a simple CD backup, would they spend the money and time on a tape based system? I doubt it. I think the best bet for users is something like Apple's Time Capsule. A simple, automated, background process that copies the data to another disk on the network. Again, not so much for video libraries, but for the digital photos and such, it's great stuff. And once you take the pretty UI away, Time Machine works with rsync and hardlinks under the hood, just like rsnapshot, which is what I've been using to get the job done. <br>