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, power and
noise issues. There's no way I'd care to keep a large RAID set at home,
whereas a tape drive would be no problem.

> I have personally loaded almost all of my own archive data onto
> live filesystems and I still haven't managed to come anywhere near
> filling a couple of very modest 10GB and 20GB filesystems. I couldn't
> even begin to conceive of what I'd do with even just 100GB unless I
> started downloading music or video, or archiving photos online or
> something....

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) 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.

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.

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.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC