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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.ysu.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!gatech!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!usenet.ucs.indiana.edu!news From: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Tape drive for backup. Date: 29 Mar 1996 20:57:24 GMT Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington Lines: 53 Sender: jfieber@fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu (John Fieber) Message-ID: <4jhirk$ovg@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> References: <Doy3z5.K2o.0.raindrop.seaslug.org@raindrop.seaslug.org> <315AFF62.167EB0E7@freebsd.org> <4jg9rq$j45@csnews.cs.colorado.edu> <Dp1HJs.5p1.0.raindrop.seaslug.org@raindrop.seaslug.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.3 In-Reply-To: <Dp1HJs.5p1.0.raindrop.seaslug.org@raindrop.seaslug.org> To: unger@raindrop.seaslug.org (Thomas Unger) In article <Dp1HJs.5p1.0.raindrop.seaslug.org@raindrop.seaslug.org>, unger@raindrop.seaslug.org (Thomas Unger) writes: >Whats wrong here? Tape back up should be an in-expensive storage >media but with the drives generally available it doesn't become >economical until you got multiple gigabytes to back up. On my home >system I just don't have that much. Tape drives are about the most boring thing you can buy. It is depressing to shell out a wad of cash for something you hope you will never really need. But, *if* you need one, they can more than pay for themselves in a very short period of time. Hardware can be expensive, data is priceless. If you buy a slow cheap tape drive, backups will be a hassle. In a home environment without any pressure of supervisors and users, if a backup is a hassle, it won't get done regularly and reliably. Thus, the chances of a backup being present if needed is less, and the chance of the tape drive paying for itself will be less. The problem with purchasing a second hard drive is that something that dammages your first hard drive stands a decent chance of dammaging the second one as well. The key feture of tape: cheap removable media. If you really value your data, you will keep more than one backup, and at least one will be in a physically remote place. You can't do that with a second hard drive. Also, I guarantee that if you put in a second hard drive, you will soon be using it as primary storage, not backup. Then what do you do? Tapes are also excellent for storing things you don't need immediate access to but would like to keep around for future reference. They work well as a transfer media if you need to share data between two machines which are otherwise not well. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a carload of tapes! I have used an Archive Viper SCSI drive for about 4 years. It can hold about 250MB per tape and writes between 5 and 6 megabytes a minute. It cost me about $350. Tapes range about $18-$22 each. Now that I've got over 1gig of disks space (and possibly 2.2 more soon), I find backups a little tedious because they cannot be done unattended and they take quite a while. 4 and 8 mm drives are quite a bit more expensive, but the speed is much better as is the cost per megabyte for tapes. Your backup strategy boils down to how important your data is. If it is important to you, grit your teeth and get a good tape drive. (now, I think I better be going off to make a backup....) -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ============