[geeks] Commiserate with me ... this sucks.

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 08:31:26AM -0400, James wrote:

> I never trust anything to anything. The odds of recovering data from a tape
> backup set is inversely proportional to the level of desperate need of the
> files. I've seen RAID go away. I've seen fire wipe out replicated storage
> devices. The technology that I trust the most (but not fully) is optical,
> but backup software (that I've seen) doesn't understand writing to a DVD
> drive.

Backup software doesn't understand DVD?  I can under stand that.  But, I
was under the impression that a lot of software systems would support
backing up to a remote disk.  Then just write a script to dump that disk
to the appropriate number of DVDs.
 
> I keep lots of copies of stuff sprinkled around on lots of systems running
> different O/S's (in case an O/S specific virus does damage).

I can't afford a proper backup system for my needs/wants, and the backup
system I was using (CD-Rs) died.  At this point, I'm tarballing the
important stuff periodically to store on several machines.  I'm thinking
of getting a DVD+R drive (well, probably DVD+/-R/RW dual layer, but I
think I want to stick with burning single layer DVD+Rs with it, for
compatibility reasons) to do backups with.  

A large tape system would be nice, but I'm concerned about that causing
me trouble doing restores in a timely manner under various circumstances
(say, the tape drive fails, so I have to wait till I can get a new one
to restore).  If I could afford a large tape drive, I would back up
everything to it, but still stick the important stuff on DVD+Rs, just in
case the drive goes and I need to get files at someone elses house.