On Wed, Oct 28, 1998 at 11:05:36AM -0700, Chris Jones wrote:
> I know people hate it when old, crusty unix types start relating war
> stories, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

As long as we clean up the crust, it seems to be okay ;-)

> At a place I used to work, we had a bunch of SGIs, each with multiple
...
> Within a week, about 5 different hard drives had failed.  
> 
> At some point, you'll have a real disaster, and multiple hard drives
> will fail at the same time.  That's why backups should be *offline*.

Where possible, I like both. Obviously this depends on how much you're 
backing up, etc, but I find the speed of a disk to disk copy reduces
downtime needed to produce stable backups. The tape streaming can then
be done smoothly from the backup disk. Recovery from disk is much 
faster if you need to restore something, and you can send the tapes
offsite or put them in a fire-safe...

Naturally, appropriate backups depend on the situation, shops that can't
have any downtime are another matter...

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net --> Mastery of UNIX, like
mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear,
but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live
in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. - Thomas Scoville