[opensuse] Re: Backup Question
Brian K. White a écrit :
Any hard drives that are currently 20 years old are nothing like the ones today, and why should a hard drive degrade any more in 20 years sitting unpowered on a climate controlled shelf than a tape and tape drive?
the magnetic surface will probably not degrade, but the lubricant do. Oils is not good after more than a few years Most HDD I'v seen fail failed after the hollidays, not restarting from being stopped. Tape have no oil. The rubber may fail, but I have (audio) tapes from the 70' still good. however I have DAT tape backup drive failed...
about all that priceless NASA sattelite and remote probe research data thats disintegrating _as we speak_ on tapes?
and I was said NASA have lost some tapes :-) 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 :-( 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. I copied my tapes to cd then cd to dvd and dvd to HDD. I dropped my tapes when my last tape reader broke, I have all my old cd somewhere. keep the old medium as long as possible. Thats all. jdd -- http://www.dodin.net http://valerie.dodin.org http://news.opensuse.org/2009/04/13/people-of-opensuse-jean-daniel-dodin/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
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 -- Per Jessen, Zürich (16.2°C) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
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.
Ditto. Managing terabytes of data [a number the data for any sized organization easily reaches - provided you are in compliance with data retention laws] on USB devices or DVD would be a complete nightmare. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
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
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
participants (4)
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Adam Tauno Williams -
Brian K. White -
jdd -
Per Jessen