On Sat, 24 May 2003, Luke Mewburn wrote:

> I used to use a mirror set for this info.  Now I've put the drives into
> two separate machines, and manually rsync the volume between them,
> because I figure that I'm more likely to lose time over a user or
> application error corrupting the data, than the loss of time if one of
> the drives fails (since it's not data that must be available all the time).

Yes, that occurred to me, too. The next step in my thinking was to do
an off-site backup by putting one of the drives in a removable bay, and
either rsyncing it or letting the RAID resync it on a regular basis.
Then it occurred to me that both my apartment and home might be burned
down in the next earthquake or covered in ash by the next erruption of
Mt. Fuji, and I would probably be best with off-continent backup.

(Fuji is quite a ways away from Tokyo, but they've calculated that the
next erruption is going to cover Tokyo in about 2 cm of ash, and that
much fine volcanic ash is likely to play severe hell with computer
equipment. I expect that there's a moderate chance I'd lose my laptop
and all my desktops.)

So I guess the proper solution is to upgrade one of my machines in North
America with an appropriate amount of disk (which, from my initial
calculations, is likely to be a 2/3 to 1/2 TB RAID array) and back up
over the network to that. Unfortunately, at the typical 50 KB/sec I
can expect over a DSL line, it's likely to take me 13 weeks to do the
initial backup. On the other hand, I can only rip about 15 CDs per day
and on weekdays only, so it's going to take me more than ten weeks just
to rip them all, so maybe that's not such a big deal.

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