Excerpts from Arnold Krille's message of 2010-12-16 08:30:32 +0100: > On Thursday 16 December 2010 01:13:24 Dan Kegel wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:48 PM, gene heskett <ghesk...@wdtv.com> wrote: > > > Now, if we can just get a law that when I have ... issued the delete to > > > the server, it truly was deleted > > > > For what it's worth, Google's caution in promising deletion > > is probably because it's not quite sure how to do that > > quickly. Users would be Very Very Angry if a disk outage > > or a fire in a datacenter resulted in the loss of their stored > > email, so Google probably has some sort of offsite backup > > arrangement, and that might complicate prompt deletion. > > ... yup, > > http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7401 > > says > > "residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up > > to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our > > backup systems." > > > > So, if you were google, would you use tape backup? If so, > > how would you do that permanent deletion thing? If not, > > how would you make darn sure you didn't anger users by > > losing messages during a disaster? > > I don't think google uses magnet-tapes or similar for any backups except the > vital core data of its business. Given the number and size of their data- > centers around the world, they just sync the data to a different part of the > world an be done with it. Of course the deletion has to be synced to all > remote-copies and probably also forwarded to older backups but once such a > mechanism is implemented it should do the actual delete within a day... > > There are even universities that decided against a new tape-library and in > favor of a big stack of disks for long-term backup because these where > cheaper, similar reliable and much faster for restore. And they don't need a > special tape-library-managing app to access the data, a file-browser or the > command-line is enough... > > Have fun, > > Arnold
I guess it really depends on what you try to achieve. Afaik the average life-span of a HD is puny 2 years. From what I heard the magnetic tapes used by for example ESA a long time ago have a life-span of 80 years. If 'store it good and forget' is what you're after then tape seems like a good idea. As for my university, as far as I know they use some RAID system for everyday and tapes for sensitive data. And they already had their whole RAID fail at the same time. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev