[geeks] Commiserate with me ... this sucks.

[velociraptor]

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 00:15:00 +1000, Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 08:31:26AM -0400, James wrote:
> > I never trust anything to anything. The odds of recovering data from a tape
> > backup set is inversely proportional to the level of desperate need of the
> > files. I've seen RAID go away. I've seen fire wipe out replicated storage
> > devices. The technology that I trust the most (but not fully) is optical,
> 
> Perhaps you should read http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/7751

Their FAQ @ <http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=61943>
give some more details about "optimal" storage, etc.

I had previously read some stuff about the different "colors" of dye
wrt the reliability/burnability of disks, but had not seen any information
about storage, other than the fact that damage to the "top" of the
disks (the printed part) is more likely to render a disk useless than
damage to the bottom of the disk.

Related to the bacteria issue mentioned, when I was working in the
Learning Resources Department at the TAMU library, we had 
trouble with laser discs in the 80's going south.  From visual
inspection, it appeared to be a deterioration of the surface under
the plastic coating, which suggested to me that the factory 
processes were not clean enough.

The big drawback to optical storage is the low speed and low-
density of media.  I rescued a single platter optical disk writer
from $work-3; it was a demo unit from testing the possibility of
doing nearline backups to optical.  I've never actually put it into
service, though I guess it would be fine for doing the backups
of the small "core" of  data that you absolutely don't want to 
lose (financial, personal docs, etc.).

$work-3 also had 2 or 3 of the refrigerator-sized jukeboxes that 
engineers could use to archive old stuff that they needed to 
occassionally access yet where waiting to get tapes from off-site 
was not feasible.  I don't know if those are still in service or not. 
The biggest issue with them was idjits firing off a find that did 
not exclude NFS mounts and having the jukes fall over dead.
Well, that and the engineers expecting that such as space was
infintely expandable.

Hmmm...I guess what we all really need are "Disks of Holding".

=Nadine=