Brian K. White wrote:
Just for the record, I never meant to suggest filling up hard drives and setting them on a shelf as a form of primary backup.
That was the main topic of this thread though. Well, not whether putting harddrives on a shelf was a viable/reliable solution, but whether doing the same to tapes was. Or rather, it was about reliability and whether tape is or isn't a reliable medium for backup and/or long-term storage.
My original statement about the reliability of tape was purely about the chances of a given write/read cycle happening without error, compared with any given hard driver write operation or network copy operation.
I understood your comparison, I just didn't and I still don't see your point. Harddrives are designed for one thing, tapes for another. Tapes have certain properties that make them suitable for backups and long-term storage, harddrives have other properties that make them less suitable for the same.
I have multiple copies, I have copies off site and separate from each other, I have history. Those are the things tapes provide, and which most people assume tapes are the only way to get. Beyond that are various factors that are different for each user. If you don't have at least 2 locations to rsync data between, you need tapes to get off site. If you don't have lots of hd space, you need tapes to get history.
Everybody's got lots of harddisk space these days. Anyone can walk into a highstreet computer shop and pick up a couple of 1.5Tb harddrives. Harddisk space comes a lot cheaper than tape ditto, so when people opt to use tapes, it's clearly not about space. It's about reliably storing data for the longer term. If your storage duration requirement goes beyond 24 months, tape is the answer. If your requirements are less than that, using harddisk space is almost certainly both cheaper and faster - and equally reliable.
If you happen to have the whole server including all it's hardware software cloned anyways because you want the almost 0 downtime, and you have the hd space to provide history,
I think perhaps you're mixing up hardware and operational reliability with storage reliability? To minimize downtime, I'm sure we all have N+1 setups in the required places, but it's an entirely separate issue. /Per -- Per Jessen, Zürich (15.4°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org