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Might Flash Memory be a Viable Backup Medium?
General Books asks: "Rather than fuss over mechanical failures and damaged media, why not use flash memory for backups? We maintain about 100 servers distributed to customers' sites. Each night we copy a backup of critical data (generally less than 128MB) to removable media in case the hard drive fails. We have experienced high failure rates with CDRWs and so now I am considering some sort of flash memory like a USB key drive. They are solid-state and you can get a 128MB device for $20. They seem ideal to me, but I can't find solid evidence. One question is how would they endure a lightning strike (perhaps not as good as an optical medium)? Admittedly, there is a wide variety of CDRW drives and media but don't they all seem risky compared to a solid-state device? More info about my circumstances: We have no network for backups. A second hard disk is not viable because it could not be rotated offsite. Tape drives are relatively expensive and overkill for our volume of data."
A USB or Firewire external drive would store far more data and could be rotated offsite.
What operating system are you running? How long do you need to keep each days data? Does it need to be stored offsite? Is this data security sensitive?
.bat files on a Windows server would work similarly. Make directories on the backup HD corresponding to day of week/month and automate a job to copy the data to the appropriate backup directory. Automate a job to tar/gzip or zip said backups. Automate a job to FTP those zip files to a remote server. Hard drives are dirt cheap, and with the tiny amount of data you are talking about you could hold a whole years worth of backups on a $70 dollar hard drive. Need redundancy? Do the same process to yet another machine with another $70 hard drive. Never buy a tape or CD-RW media again. Never worry about backups again. Set it and forget it. Have the backup machine(s) email you the results of each night's backup just to be sure they happened. Make a test file on the server and delete it and restore it every so often to ensure you can recover last data. Burn monthly to a CD-R for even better sleep at night.
An extra hard drive and cron works wonders on a Linux or Novell server. I assume the task scheduler and a set of
Let's say you fill the entire card every backup... At one backup a day you could use the card for 1000 years without exceeding the write limits of the card. Hardly a disadvantage when you consider that unlike a hard drive, the flash will still work after you drop it.