[NTLUG:Discuss] Question about tape drives

[Steve Baker]

Jack Snodgrass wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Mar 2003 19:02:50 -0600, David Ross wrote:
> 
> 
>>I hear you guys/gals talk about tape drives,but why not back-up to cd-r?
>>i'd like to hear some pros and cons
>>and i thank you for your time
>>David
>>
> 
>    650MB ish is kind of small. That's the downside. 
> 
>    I just got a DVD+R for work and plan on doing some 
> 4Gig backups. 

The only viable way that I know is to use the network to back up one
hard drive onto another in another PC.  With drive sleds and cheap IDE
drives, hard discs are a pretty reasonable backup media.  They are fast,
convenient, and have by far the largest capacity of ANY backup media.

Remember, a blank CD-R costs approx 50c - which is about 75cents per
Gigabyte, but 180Gb IDE drives are down to maybe $100 - which is also
around 75 cents a Gigabyte.  There aren't any magnetic tape solutions
with more than 18Gb that cost less than $10 per tape - so again, the
IDE hard drive is the cheapest.

There was a piece on /. the other day about the new blue laser DVD+R's
that have 24Gb capacities!!   Not cheap - but at least you can back
up your PC on only a dozen disks....OK - so that's still too small and
therefore inconvenient - but if the blank media are less than $8 each,
it's just marginally cheaper than IDE drives if you can re-use the
blank media enough times and amortise the $4,000 cost of the writer.

Really: Take a scruffy old PC with a slow old CPU and too little RAM
to be useful, slap a couple of demountable IDE sleds on it and
backup over your network.

The gloriously wonderful thing about this approach is that you can
restore from a backup after a catastrophic disk crash just by swapping
out the drive.  You can be back up and running in 10 minutes.

If you accidentally delete an important file, you can just copy it
back over the network...no rummaging through piles of old media
looking for the right backup CD's.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>    WorkEmail: <sjbaker at link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
GCS d-- s:+ a+ C++++$ UL+++$ P--- L++++$ E--- W+++ N o+ K? w--- !O M- V-- PS++ PE- Y-- PGP-- t+ 5 X R+++ tv b++ DI++ D G+ e++ h--(-) r+++ y++++
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----