On Apr 18, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Dennis Clarke wrote:
Maybe with a definition of what a "backup" is and then some way to achieve it. As far as I know the only real backup is one that can be tossed into a vault and locked away for seven years. Or any arbitrary amount of time within in reason. Like a decade or a century. But perhaps a backup today will have as much meaning as papertape over time. Can we discuss this with a few objectives ? Like define "backup" and then describe mechanisms that may achieve one? Or a really big question that I guess I have to ask, do we even care anymore?
This is actually a good point. ZFS seems to be able to do a credible job of keeping itself intact and free from corruption in a day to day operational sense and provides for those conveniences like snapshots. It may be that we need to overcome our innate fear of spinning rust failure and trust in the force, er, technology. However, there still is need for a good way to provide archival storage on a regular basis for regulatory and reference reasons as well as disaster recovery archives which live off site in a vault someplace. There is also the need to minimize consumption of expensive fast disk by use of nearline cheap SATA or off line tape (D- D-T, SAMFS). It seems like the industry has developed ways to achieve this over the last 20 years (50 years?), but we just don't have access to this with ZFS yet in a convenient and easy to manage way. I'm hoping someone will tell me I'm way wrong and provide a nice explanation of this works.
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