[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[David L. Willson]

OK, I'm not certain how this answered my question.  You rotate media a lot.
I get that.  You want to retain data for a long time.  Got that, too.  You
want to be able to do restores simply and quickly.  Got it.

What does tape buy you over file-backups to a central, possibly removable
hard-drive or six?  Does it cost less?  Is it faster, easier to acccess,
higher overall capacity, or what?

And what does "EOB" stand for?  Sorry...

Just to give a general idea why I'm asking this question:  I'm finding that
tape costs at least 50% more than IDE/ATA disk space, and is slower, and
requires special software for backups, and is less reliable in terms of I/O,
and requires the same special software for restores.  So, my thought is:
big-ass Linux-based RAID + one hot-pluggable sATA / USB 2.0 / FireWire 800 +
x discs for said hot-pluggable = fast, cheap, reliable backup system.  Seems
to beat any tape-based system on all points...  Or am I missing something?

-----Original Message-----
From: clue-tech-admin at clue.denver.co.us
[mailto:clue-tech-admin at clue.denver.co.us] On Behalf Of Richard Mancusi
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 2:37 PM
To: clue-tech at clue.denver.co.us
Subject: Re: [CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

This is a very site specific question.  How often are you required to
restore?
How quickly are you expected to complete your restore?  How far back is it
expected that you have retained data onsite and off?

Offsite storage is very important as an archive - but fairly useless for
quick recovery unless it is near.

I am forced to rotate 15 EOD backups AND I rotate a special weekend backup
offsite for each of my servers.  Call it a bad environment if you wish.
I call it go with the flow.

Rich


On Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:52:35 -0600, David L. Willson <dlwillson at thegeek.nu>
wrote:
> OK, I'm no newbie, and I find myself asking the same damn question 
> every time I get into the Backup & Disaster Recovery design process.  
> Why does any business with less than a TB of data to backup use tapes?  
> Why, why, why, when almost any fixed disk media is much cheaper and 
> almost as easy to take offsite?
> 
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