Re: Need backup hardware suggestions

From: Jean-David Beyer (jdbeyer_at_exit109.com)
Date: 09/11/04 

Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2004 10:06:55 -0400

A Nengineer wrote:

> I am considering one of these:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/4jldr
>
> Costs about US$350 or less, additional 35GB Cartidges are about $50 each
> (you can get a 4-pack for $200).
>
> So it's very cost effective. The only drawback I can see would be that
> you'd have to tend to it to remove and replace cartridges, but that's
> true of a lot of tape systems as well.

I would find that small size crippling. When you consider that it is
difficult to buy a hard drive any smaller than 40GBytes for SCSI, and for
EIDE drives, less than 60 GBytes, and that some machines have more than
one hard drive (this one has 6), trying to squeeze all that onto a 35GByte
medium would be a frustrating experience, especially if you had to do it
daily as many of us do.

> The cartridge isn't "standard" at
> least at this time, but recall how ubiquitous the ZIP disks became, so
> that might not be a problem either.

How ubiquitous are zip drives? I have seen only one in the last 8 years,
and that was on a machine I recommended for a friend's desktop machine for
backups. She never did any backups even though she had 3 Zip disks. I have
seen lots of machines (personal use machines) that had no backup mechanism
other than floppy disks (which were never used either). In my experience,
people are so used to operating systems crashing all the time, rebooting
to solve the slightest problem, that losing files is a fact of life as far
as they are concerned: they just do not know any better.

Nowdays, I do see machines with CD-ROM writing drives that could be used
for small backups. But if you have around 250 GBytes (recall that the O.P.
was talking about _backing up three machines_ on a small LAN) of hard
drives and a CD-R will hold only about 750 Megabytes, a full backup would
require something like 325 CD-Rs to do it. With those 35 GByte drives, a
small file server of 250GBytes would require only 7 cartridges per day, or
161 cartridges for a backup program such as I use. Does the thing come
with an autoloader?
>
> All in all, looks like a relatively inexpensive and safe backup system.

True, if your time is not worth anything. 

-- 
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