<<Get an old tape drive off ebay if you don't want to spend too much....Tape is a much better way to do large backups. No need to fiddle with multiple media volumes, incremental backups etc. They are faster, and easy to take with you on the road etc as an off site backup....It also allows a complete restore capability.>>
Thanks, but I'm quite aware of tapes. Used to use them at Intel, and Paul Engel used to tell me about his tape woes.
The problems for small systems are several-fold:
1. Cost. Comparing apples to apples, "old off Ebay" to "old off Ebay," multigigabyte tape drives are still expensive.
2. Reliability. I hear many reports of tape drives flaking out. Not too surprising, considering the mechanisms. (Paul can talk about his HP tape drive experiences if he chooses to.)
3. "Complete restore capability" is less important to me than having utter confidence that a file is actually visible on the desktop. Besides, my Retrospect software allows full and complete backups onto multiple CD-ROMs.
4. Multiple CD-ROM drives. I happen to have 2 CD-ROM drives in my laptops, 2 in my desktop machines, and 3 external CD-RW drives (of varying speeds and vintages). Not to mention an old drive or two I may have gathering dust that could be pressed into service. This means that the backups I have created can be read by _any_ of these 7 main CD-ROM drives. By contrast, when a tape drive craps out, the choice is either to try to get it repaired or to buy another one. (Paul can outline his thinking on this.)
<<Having multiple drives on a single system does not take care of the problem of theft, fire etc >>
I mentioned having the multiple high capacity drives as insurance against drive crashes, not theft or fire. That's what the CD-ROMs are for.
You apparently missed the part of my post where I talked about keeping a set at a friend's house, plus a set in a fire-resistant gun vault. (I also sometimes keep a set in one of my vehicles, not parked in my garage. Odds of a thief or a fire hitting both my house and car trunk are small.)
BTW, I know of some folks who use removable hard drives. (Firewire does the same thing, easily, and SCSI, too, but with more finagling of cables and terminators.) They can store the removable drives in other places, safes, safe deposit boxes, etc.
In any case, none of these points differentiates tapes from CD-ROMs.
--Tim May |
