[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[Eric Jorgensen]

We've been talking about how to get around using tapes
for backup by using disks of various types.  I
personally like firewire, and have several external
enclosures for large, cheap IDE drives to do my
backups at home.  But, the problem for using a system
such as this (or even larger) is that sure, you can
recover the data from the last rsync, but can you do a
point in time recovery?

Let's say that you have to go back to "last Tuesday,
'cuz I think I deleted the file on Wednesday." 
Unfortunately, in our jobs, this does come up!  So if
you're doing a simple rsync, you've just rsync'd over
the data you need.  It becomes more difficult to keep
multple copies of your backups online, but doable. 
But, even say the Network Applicance folks have
"snapshotting" built in so you can go to a particular
date without a problem.

Just something to keep in mind.

Eric