Re: [WinMac] Need advice on a backup solution

Ron LaPedis(RonL[at]laserphernalia.com)
Fri, 07 Jan 2000 10:09:01 -0800

>
>What I need is some additional ammo as to why a 30GB hard drive is a really
>bad idea and an AIT2 tape drive is a good idea. Any technical, financial,
>philosophical, and personal experiences would be appreciated.

You are backing up hard drives to tape because:
- Hard drives crash sometimes apparently without reason (rarely though)
- Can you say "striction"?
- Hard drives can be damaged by dropping, etc.
- Hard drives are usually inside of a machine (there are removables, of
course) and if your site goes up in smoke, kiss your backup HD goodbye
along with the data on the drives it's backing up. (Something like 70% of
the businesses in the bombed World Trade Center were out of business within
a year. Sh*t happens, dude)

On the other hand, tapes are:
- Much more fault tolerant (check out DLTape instead of AIT. I prefer
linear recording since the tapes last longer)
- Much easier to rotate offsite (you ARE moving your tapes offsite, right??)
- Much easier to secure after the backup.
- Much better to rotate so that you have several generations of backup
(Oops, I need the version of my file from last month, do you have it?)
- Cheaper per MB
- Universal (Your primary site is gone. Carry the backups along with a copy
of the backup program on floppies and you can restore your files just about
anywhere). OTOH I understand that in the PC world some drives can only be
read by the same kind of controller they were written with. I'm a Mac
person so I don't know how true this is.

Best,
Ron LaPedis, CBCP (certified business contingency planner)
Contingency Planning Architect
Golden Gate Software, Inc.
San Francisco, CA USA

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Fri Jan 07 2000 - 11:06:43 PST