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Yours was the best of the bunch (minus formatting html tags), though I enjoyed reading about the trials and tribulations of punch tape vs punch cards vs tape/dat backup systems. The biggest problem I had many years ago was using a dat format system that I could not longer purchase hardware for. So I had tapes, but no way to read them. That taught me a lesson. Never use a media that I might not be able to read from 10 years from today. Thus I only backup on hard disks today.

I agree that to backup music, videos and other static content that has been downloaded via the internet (and not personally created) is a waste of time and space. As you pointed out, with even a throttled cable connection you can download this fairly quickly. So never waste time backing it up. Totally agree with you.

Now the one exception to video, pictures and music, are those that you create yourself. For your own personal pictures and personally created video. That needs to be backed up and I would suggest a harddrive (or multiple hard disks) for this purpose.

If you work in the video / movie industry creating content, obviously this comment does not apply to you...check into creating your own Linux video sever farm for while-you-sleep-rendering and a homemade Linux SANs like this Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage. You will have to learn some Linux to do this, but it would be well worth it, if you have the need. This article should help you, Thoughts about this DIY-Thumper and storage in general

Just as with industrial and union jobs of yesterday, white collar IT jobs, your movie editing jobs are now being offshored to India and when I was in LA a couple of years ago, a number of studios were relocating to Canada because it was cheaper for them...fyi.

For home users not in an industry creating massive videos, the next few paragraphs should cover you. Give thoughts to what you really need and why. Don't back up anything you do not have too. Like Software, Operating Systems, only focus on the data you create.

Plan your locations for different types of data, since you can label (mount point) your directory whatever you want. You could have one for video, one for audio (music), one for non picture images (your digital camera) and one for everything else. If you have the need, perhaps a DB directory as well. This would look as follows:

/video/ ~ for downloaded video, not home movies, never backed up (this will be your largest directory for most)
/music/ ~ for downloaded music, not self created, never backed up (you could write this to DVR or copy to a USB thumb drive if you want, the files are NOT that big. A 64GB thumb drive costs less than $30 on sale. Get a Micro USB adapter and only purchase micro SD cards and get very large ones. I use to use 8GB in my Nokia N800, now my zareason ZT2 Tablet has a 32GB micro SD card in it. Since I am using it for books, PHP development and research only, it will take a very long time to fill up.)
/myvideo/ ~ personally made video, back it up
/mymusic/ ~ personally created music, back it up
/images/ ~ digital images from your digital camera, back it up
/db/ ~ custom database stuff, back it up
/data/ ~ everything else, back it up

For the majority of you reading this, from /myvideo/ to /data/ (five different directories) will easily fit on one 500GB drive. If you are smart and compress it when you backup, you can probably fit a months worth of backups on that 500GB drive if not more. Linux comes with built in compression / backup commands and you can use PKZIP (or other compression program) for Windows to compress your data sizes and make your backup space go further. Even mo

As everyone else, that using a collection of tapes with a single or small number of tape drives is impractical.

Instead, I recommend reading up on hierarchical storage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_management/

Also, if you really want a solution which does what you ask for, SamFS may be for you:

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/4240-Less-known-Solaris-features-SamFS.html/

Bye,

os10000

"So i assume Product Management was right with their decision to remove the support in order to make the feature i can't talk of possible, as i don't think that many of the early migrators are still using the system in question, as most systems have reached EOSL."

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7363-Result-of-the-How-long-do-you-wait-before-Solaris-11-gets-on-your-prod-systems.html

And as he points out, how many people upgrade their server OS major version? The newest machines cut off are more than two years old, and no one is going for 11 today unless they have to, people will let it sit a while before they switch, if they are going to upgrade stuff, so by the time they do, this will be more than 3 years old.

I don't think the author had any understanding of the history of SPARC or Oracle (Sun)'s product linup. Here is an informative interview from the useful Sun hardware oriented blog on the subject http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/ http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/innovation/innovator-hetherington-191304.html

A thought about the recent development at OpenOffice

ZFS is nice but it doesn't have an fsck, partly because of its design philosophy. I think this is an omission and http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ explains why (links to many examples where ZFS won't open a zpool after an abrupt shutdown, possibly due to ZFS bugs or disks that lie about flushing cache to disk).

There is a new zpool recovery feature - discussed in http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6071-No,-ZFS-really-doesnt-need-a-fsck.html - the command is "zpool clear -F data" which is a very specific sort of fsck - it just unwinds the last few transactions, enabling you to have a valid zpool but losing a few recent updates, which is usually better than a complete restore from backups. The feature is mentioned at http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6067-PSARC-2009479-zpool-recovery-a.html (PSARC 2009/479) and is available since Opensolaris build b128 (ref: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=127689&tstart=0 )

For those who want a ZFS based NAS, have a look at NexentaStor (which has a proprietary GUI, free for up to 12 TB of disk) or Nexenta Core (just the OS without GUI, and open source) - NexentaStore has some nice features to get you started quickly, or you can use the open source napp.it GUI with the Nexenta Core. Nexenta uses a very recent zpool version (v24) and is based on OpenSolaris build b134 so it includes the above zpool reocvery feature.

Nexenta generally will move to using the Illumos fork of OpenSolaris when that's stable, so it should have a future as long as NetApp don't sue them. If they do get sued you could move to a more community-based distro based on Illumos.

Key question is whether the ZFS on Linux port will be updated to the Solaris b134 code to include this feature. Without it, you are in for some painful recovery using zdb (filesystem debugger) - but in any case you need up to date backups of your entire zpool. FreeBSD does have ZFS but using a much older zpool version without this feature - from my point of view, it's best to use the latest Solaris ZFS code to get the best stability, despite the limitations of Solaris hardware support.

ZFS recovery is an interesting topic given commodity hardware - see http://opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=292794 - there are other failure modes not addressed buy this zpool recovery feature.

ZFS is nice but it doesn't have an fsck, partly because of its design philosophy. I think this is an omission and http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ explains why (links to many examples where ZFS won't open a zpool after an abrupt shutdown, possibly due to ZFS bugs or disks that lie about flushing cache to disk).

There is a new zpool recovery feature - discussed in http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6071-No,-ZFS-really-doesnt-need-a-fsck.html - the command is "zpool clear -F data" which is a very specific sort of fsck - it just unwinds the last few transactions, enabling you to have a valid zpool but losing a few recent updates, which is usually better than a complete restore from backups. The feature is mentioned at http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6067-PSARC-2009479-zpool-recovery-a.html (PSARC 2009/479) and is available since Opensolaris build b128 (ref: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=127689&tstart=0 )

For those who want a ZFS based NAS, have a look at NexentaStor (which has a proprietary GUI, free for up to 12 TB of disk) or Nexenta Core (just the OS without GUI, and open source) - NexentaStore has some nice features to get you started quickly, or you can use the open source napp.it GUI with the Nexenta Core. Nexenta uses a very recent zpool version (v24) and is based on OpenSolaris build b134 so it includes the above zpool reocvery feature.

Nexenta generally will move to using the Illumos fork of OpenSolaris when that's stable, so it should have a future as long as NetApp don't sue them. If they do get sued you could move to a more community-based distro based on Illumos.

Key question is whether the ZFS on Linux port will be updated to the Solaris b134 code to include this feature. Without it, you are in for some painful recovery using zdb (filesystem debugger) - but in any case you need up to date backups of your entire zpool. FreeBSD does have ZFS but using a much older zpool version without this feature - from my point of view, it's best to use the latest Solaris ZFS code to get the best stability, despite the limitations of Solaris hardware support.

ZFS recovery is an interesting topic given commodity hardware - see http://opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=292794 - there are other failure modes not addressed buy this zpool recovery feature.

The policy of not eviscerating your corporate IT structure on bleeding-edge software is sound, but in terms of the browser, or any other app in isolation, the best security is going to come from the latest version. And by enabling SELinux.

That's not true for most software used in business where the product hasn't been EOL'd and important software usually has a long shelf-life because most businesses won't purchase software without a long support term.

All software has security issues and a lot of those security issues are only discovered after they have been out in the world for a while because it is impossible to do enough QA to find every possible problem. A product can be out in use for years and still receive regular security updates for vulnerabilities that weren't discovered when it first came out.

If a new version comes out it will have new features as well as having some bug and security patches. Those bug and security patches will be backported to the old version and any other versions that are still supported. These life cycles can be quite long, for example Solaris has a 10 year life cycle.

People don't want to have to worry about migrating software that works but they expect it to work as long as possible and be secure.

Now, whenever you release new features, those new features haven't gone through the public QA cycle where real life people put it through real life workloads where other problems and security issues may come up that the limited resources of the vendor's QA team couldn't find. So now you not only have to worry about what security issues there were in the previous release that haven't come to light, you also have to worry about the new issues in new code that have barely been used.

I've just cruised through this list of netbooks over at Amazon. It returned just over 5,000 results and I can't find one without a camera. I'll keep looking but this leads me to believe that you may just need to look at a regular laptop. And the wait is probably going to exist otherwise because you are obviously looking for something that is just outside the norm for these.
 
  This discussion from last September didn't turn up anything, except the Mini 9 - which you already mention. Though they do bring up one option that I think is the best bet; to open up the case, yank the camera and fill in the spot where it went. It can't be that hard. If some guy can fit an LCD behind the apple logo - you can get the camera out.
 
The phone issue I find being brought up going back to 2005 and it's probably older - this seemed to offer hope and mentions a few models but it's old and I'm not sure how stuff would have carried forward. Most stuff I find mentions Blackberry which you already have. So my guess is that there is no treasure trove of camera free devices that you have missed. You are just in a tough spot.

I'm not sure where you are seeing T2 performing poorly against Power?

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/3962-UltraSPARC-T2-vs.-Power6-today-Siebel-CRM.html

Do you have a reference? Here is oracle's report: http://www.oracle.com/apps_benchmark/doc/Sun_Siebel8_10000_PSPP_On_Solaris.pdf

Every article I can find shows that T2's are clearly ahead in terms of price vs performance.

Or perhaps how you set a quota?

You can set a quota on a per filesystem basis. If you mean how to set a per user quota, you can't really do that yet but it's coming. There's nothing stopping you from creating a filesystem for each user and then assigning a quota to that filesystem.

Or perhaps how you do HSM?

How's this on ZFS and HSM?.

Or perhaps how you run it in a cluster environment?

If you're interested in high availability there are options with Sun Cluster (which is free) and ZFS. If you need a cluster file system that's a whole different beast. Might want to read this ZFS for Lustre information.

It looks like you're in the UK. Did they start censoring websites such as Google so you couldn't answer your own questions?

Although the technology it is used in is repugnant, NTFS has always been the One True Filesystem.

I thought ZFS was.

And ZFS has native support for SSD as L2ARC. http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/media/presentations/ssd.pdf I have nothing but praise for ZFS. Simple to manage, reliable, fast. With native CIFS instead of User file system Samba, I've seen orders of magnitude performance from windows machines when doing networked file access. Gary

I think updates are free, haven't installed it as yet... currently downloading.

According to this guy http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/4361-Playing-around-with-Opensolaris-2008.05-Release-Candidates.html/, system updates can be done in 2 commands and are tied in with the snapshot feature of ZFS automatically thus allowing trivial switching between the pre and post upgrade boot environments.

HTH

RAID-5 is EVIL! Never Ever, EVER use RAID-5, You will LOSE DATA! RAID-1 or RAID-10 only for production use.

If you are thinking about Raid-5, forget it, just stripe your drives in a RAID-0 and enjoy the performance benefits and keep frequent good backups and test your restores.

Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
Why aren't disk reads more reliable?
End of Raid 5

finally, BAARF - Battle Against ANY Raid Five BAARF

HTH, HAND, don't cry.