[NTLUG:Discuss] Question about tape drives

[Kelledin]

On Saturday 15 March 2003 07:49 am, Rob Apodaca wrote:
> > 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.[...]
> > 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.
>
> [...]
>
> These can be hot-swapped?

Sometimes.  Depends on the sled.  It also depends on the IDE 
driver--hdparm can unregister IDE devices, but only if it's 
supported by the kernel-land driver.

Even if they can't be hot-swapped, it's often not such a big deal 
to just power down the machine.

-- 
Kelledin
"If a server crashes in a server farm and no one pings it, does 
it still cost four figures to fix?"