[ On Tuesday, June 24, 2003 at 07:27:29 (+0900), Curt Sampson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Backup to Tape
>
> On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 
> > You can trivially create quite massive-capacity RAID-0+1 filesystems
> > with a decent sized set of modern high-capacity drives.
> 
> Well, not really. You start to get into controller, case,

Yes, really!  :-)

The controller and case requirements are easily solved (and more options
for the necessary component parts appear on the market every day).

> power and
> noise issues.

Those issues are irrelevant -- sufficient power is simply a requirement,
not a problematic issue; and noise is a personal opinion thing and
varies greatly on the environment.

For a really professional (and equally expensive) solution there's
Apple's Xserve and their big add-on RAID box.  From there the options
for build-it-yourself solutions are pretty much endless.

There's probably a product niche opportunity in here somewhere....

> There's no way I'd care to keep a large RAID set at home,

You couldn't likely hear the noise from an additional PC in my computer
room at home, even if it did have a half-dozen ATA drives and sufficient
fans to cool them.  :-)

BTW, I wasn't really thinking of the typical non-computer home, but
rather small to mid-sized office environments where backups are a
recognized necessity.

> Not an uncommon thing these days. My storage requirements were similar
> to yours until I bought a digital camera (currently generating over 100
> MB/month in new storage requirements, and that only because I use a
> realtively low resolution [1.2 Mpixel rather than my camera's best 3.4
> Mpixel] and don't take that many pictures)

Burn them to DVD.  ;-)

> and starting putting my CDs
> on-line (currently at 150 GB, and estimated to exceed 225 MB by the time
> I finish only what I currently own). I'd love to scan the cover art and
> liner notes, too, if I had any easy way to do it.

I'd venture to say that CDs are not really things you "must" backup, and
particularly not for off-site copies.  You do, after all, still have the
original media, right?  ;-)

> Needless to say, setting up an off-site backup of this (preferably
> off-continent: I expect a fair amount of data stored in the Kanto region
> will be permanently inaccessable after the next Fuji erruption deposits
> a few centimeters of ash in the neighbourhood) is a bit of a challange.

Send the original media (and a copy of the DVD your burn your photos
onto) to your safer off-site location.  ;-)

> Anyway, backing up to disk is a fine thing for some circumstances,
> though not for all. There are all sorts of different types of
> requirements out there.

No question about that -- my only real point was that using disk drives
as backup media is not just possible and economic, but solves many other
issues traditionally faced by backup schemes involving sequential access
media.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
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