Per Jessen wrote:
jdd wrote:
I've seen drafts as old as one hundred years and still in use (electric network) :-) oiled paper :-) no reader needed but eyes.
only to show that this hole discussion have little meaning :-(
The discussion is perhaps a little exotic, but the long-term storage of data is a very real challenge for many businesses. Today, for up to 25 years, it is most easily and best solved by tape.
If you need to keep the info, keep it on the today most available medium (cd, dvd, USB HDD, tape, whatever) and *copy* it on the next most available media asap.
It's a solution, but it doesn't scale.
/Per
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. 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. Of course tapes do a particular job nothing else does. I was saying that's not necessarily the only or automatically always the best way to do that job. Or rather, the job a tape does is not necessarily a job everyone needs done. They would be wildly inefficient in my case, and yet, I have data that must be preserved from loss, which is what usually brings tapes to mind. 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. If you want to store a copy all by itself in a secure place without a whole server room attached to it, you need a tape to put into a lock box in a bank. If you want to refresh several remote copies of data several times per day in near real time, no tape can do that. If you want random immediate access to all extant copies including all history points, no tape can do that. If you want to have the server and service the data is part of also ready to take over instantly, instead of merely have a copy of the data somewhere that you could use to reconstruct a server and it's services, no tape can do that. 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 do still see one thing a tape provides that the above does not, which is when you write a tape and put it on a shelf, the most amazingly genius virus can not touch it. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org