Backup Ideas? (was Re: [geeks] Big Blue Smoke)

[William Barnett-Lewis]

> From: Eric Dittman <dittman at dittman.net>
> > > I run parts of my business on IDE - but I also have redundant machines
> > > and load balancers, as well as NAS.  If/when one of my servers dies,
> > > nobody notices - and I can bring up a spare server in about 10 minutes
> > > to take it's place.  Of course, these are *appliances*, and fast disk
> > > I/O isn't necessary.
> >
> > I'm not longer thrilled with IDE. I had a drive die and latch the bus, so
> > drive #3 could not be reached. So much for fault tolerant filesystems.
> 
> The biggest problem I'm seeing with IDE lately is that people
> are buying these huge IDE drives for home use without any way
> of backing them up.  The cost of backing up has not kept pace
> with the cost of storage in the home market.
> 
> You can buy an inexpensive DLT4000 on eBay right now, but the
> tapes are still a little expensive (DLTIVs).  Telling someone
> they need to spend $250 (drive) plus $60 (three DLTIV tapes,
> if you're lucky), plus $50 for a SCSI card to back up their
> $150 120GB IDE drive doesn't work.  They'd rather spend $300
> for two drives, which does make more sense, if they can get
> them mirrored or remember to actually copy the data to the
> second drive.

This is something that's been niggling at my brain for sometime. My work
machines have a nice proper backup plan in place - tested every so often
- but at home I have my Sun Blade 100 with 55gb of disk, my Vaxstation
4000/90 with 5 gb of disk (and I hope soon to be 11 gb), and a Thinkpad
750 with a 1gb disk in it. None of them have _ever_ been backed up as
there doesn't seem to be a sensible way to do this on a hobbyist budget.
Is there something I missed or do I keep playing craps? In the long run
there's nothing irreplaceable on these machines (the one thing that was
I've already recreated by OCR more than once... ;').  

Thanks,

William


> Eric Dittman
> dittman at dittman.net
> Check out the DEC Enthusiasts Club at http://www.dittman.net/
>
-- 
You better watch out    What you wish for;
It better be worth it   So much to die for.
                                Courtney Love