> On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Austin L. Denyer wrote:
>
> >Of course, the biggest problem with these new big drives (I see that
> >Hitachi are selling 72Gb drives on buy.com for $146, and I've seen
80Gb
> >(I think Maxtor)) is that although one can buy the drives cheaply
> >enough, how the heck does one back them up economically? Look at the
> >prices of tape streamers that can handle such capacities (hint -
second
> >mortgage).
>
> A removable disk pack. Slap another one of those in there, mirror the
> disk... ready :)
OK, now start rotating your backups so that you have something to fall
back on, and watch your costs rocket.
Why rotate backups? Allow me to tell you a short true story.
I was working for a company that ran Novell NetWare 3.12 fileservers.
In my absence (and without my knowledge) a contractor made some changes
to one of the servers. A few weeks later, the server crashed.
It turned out that the moron had infected the DOS partition of the
server with the ripper virus (my anti-virus NLM could not see a virus
there).
Result? Slow corruption that went un-noticed until it blatted a crucial
sector and knocked out the SYS: volume.
Restore from last backup? Not unless I want to put all the corrupted
data back.
I think a cabinet full of hard drives would soon add up to more than the
cost of a tape streamer and tapes.
Regards,
Ozz.
