> Recovery is of course the important thing, but recovery is moot without > backups.
Agreed. Backup is becoming an ever more important question in my mind that would be worth discussing though. Honestly I think that this is going to become an ever more troublesome issue: Say I go out and buy myself a 180gig ide hard drive. I do lots of work with say video and really enjoy my mp3 collection. How does one back that up. If for argument say 100gigs is being used and get 1:2 compression that is 50 gigs of raw data. Every backup method will at least require that much media space plus at least incremental updates each day. So what are our storage options? Tape, the tried and true backup solution. Looking on line a bit I see that to get a tape backup drive that supports over 50gigs of data I'm looking at about $1000 and around $100 per tape. You can get cheaper drives that have less space and such, but then you start spending time changing tapes all the time unless you spend real money for a tape robot. How about CDRs? Well, at 700mb a pop, that's a lot of disks for one backup. Lets see 50gigs/700mb = 73 disks or so. If it takes only 5 minutes to burn one thats 6 hours of backup time with user intervention needed every 5 minutes. Daily incremental of course wouldn't be that big, but restore speed gets even slower than this 6 hours DVDRs are better, but not really that much. Since I don't own a DVD drive I don't really know the amount of data you can put on one. A cheap DVD burner is around $300 I think, so we're doing better than tape but if we figure 4gig a disk, that's still 13 disks and a lot of disk switching. The best I've figured so far is to just go buy some more cheap ide disks and I haven't even talked about how much cpu horse power and time it takes to compress 100gigs of data. And what if you want off site backup? When you expand this problem out to a small corporate network or more it becomes a really big issue. Perhaps I'm missing something major that someone can enlighten me on. Being (STILL) a college student without time or money, I rsync my home directories, config files and log files to one of my servers daily. This means a lot of disk space but I don't use that much and you should try backing up your laptop over a dsl line (to say nothing of a modem). If I want to do more, I can do incremental backup of the server's copy (which also reduces concurrency issues). If my laptop hard drive dies I'm looking at reinstalling the whole os first and then copying data over. If I rm -rf /home right before the backup starts I'm in trouble. Likewise if the house I live in burns down. Doesn't sound to great does it. Well, I'm happy, now at least I have a backup plan which is better than backup to /dev/null and restore from /dev/urandom. >>>------> -- +-------------+-----------------------+---------------+ | Ed Schaller | Dark Mist Networking | psuedoshroom | +-------------+-----------------------+---------------+
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