Every time people say tape is dead, it lives another 20 years.
*shrug*
But to lightly address your points, tapes are getting larger and faster to compete with hard drive storage. Tape backup is expensive, reliable, clunky and never-fast-enough (that's not the same as it being slow.) Recovering from tape is annoying. It's only painful when the data isn't there, which in my experience isn't usually the hardware's fault. Tapes themselves have almost no moving parts -- it's the tape drives that do, and losing a tape drive is much different than losing a tape. That's not even possible with hard drives.
Tapes are not necessarily the right idea for the home user, but that doesn't mean they're dead. What we're already seeing in industry, and this will become more and more standard, is staging data to large disk stores first, and then archiving it off to tape (for longevity and off-site storage.) This is good for the user, since recent data is very quickly available. It's also good for the tapes and tape drives, since backing from a local machine is faster and keeps the tape drives streaming.
The hardware mentioned in this article is pretty slick, and it looks like something I expected would raise slashdot's eyebrow. However, there's a big element of backups that article almost entirely dismissed:
Software.
What you really have are 20+ machines, with independent IPs, system configs, and lots of DAS (direct attached storage,) with no mention about how to seemlessly make these appear to be the 70GB data store. Or where to find the machine / drive / volume that has the data you need. Or how to tell your backup clients to communicate with the hive of machines.
Good backups and restores are more dependent on the software that drives them rather than the hardware they're serviced by. That article, albeit cool to see their home-grown environment, sailed right by that point.
It mentioned something about clients connect to one of the nodes that acts as the server, but then what? Does the server NFS mount all of those remote drives? So all of the traffic from the clients is throttled to the server's GigE card? (Coming in from the client, and back out again to the backup slave?) OR, does the server delegate the backup to one of the slaves. But then how does the server know what data is where?
If they've really designed that great of a software backup package, that can make that system slickly manage that many backup slaves, they should market the software. That's more a challenge than the hardware!
HD support from TiVo is coming RSN... I think I heard rumors on the community forums about HD support by year end, but who knows if that's accurate? (And they never said which year ending....)
OTOH, that doesn't mean that short-sighted tech companies won't slash their internship programs or otherwise leave techies out in the cold. I was supposed to have an engineering internship at On Semiconductor (a Motorola spin-off) paying about $20/hour during the summer of 2001. Unfortunately, the semiconductor industry collapsed that spring, and On cut their entire internship program in addition to cutting lots of permanent positions.
I've heard of places that increase their intern program when money is tight and full-time employees are laid off/understaffed. Bang for buck, interns are cheap for the companies. It sucks when you're looking for full-time jobs, and the companies are only hiring interns!
It's not only a concern that physical media may become obsolete, but also the algorithms in which data is encoded on the media. We have lots of old backup media (reel to reel tape, 8mm tapes) at work that are probably still readable, but no one knows how the data was encoded on that media (or more importantly,) what information is on which tape.
Most commercial tape backup solutions have proprietary encoding solutions, and who knows if that company is going to be in business/supported in 50 years. In fact, for true(r) long-term storage, it's recommended to copy the data from the commercial tape backup solution copy to plain old tar.
Keeping an archive on media that will be around in 50 years seems like a minor point compared to finding the exact tape with the right data you need in a format you can still decode.
I used to mouse entirely with my left hand (I'm left handed.) I've switched now to almost always mousing with my right hand. Because I hop between so many shared computers, moving the mouse got to be a pain so I just got used to using the mouse with my right.
That works for all applications, except games. I've tried, and I just suck too much with my non-primary hand mousing in Quake. That's one application where you've got to switch it over.
FWIW, they do have left handed mice that are contoured to fit 'us', but they generally don't have a wheel so I wouldn't consider one.
Slashdot Mirror
We found Bin Laden, and he's an excellent dancer...
I'm more worried about the cell phone a few inches away from my balls than I am the WiFi APs in the buildings around me!
Every time people say tape is dead, it lives another 20 years.
*shrug*
But to lightly address your points, tapes are getting larger and faster to compete with hard drive storage. Tape backup is expensive, reliable, clunky and never-fast-enough (that's not the same as it being slow.) Recovering from tape is annoying. It's only painful when the data isn't there, which in my experience isn't usually the hardware's fault. Tapes themselves have almost no moving parts -- it's the tape drives that do, and losing a tape drive is much different than losing a tape. That's not even possible with hard drives.
Tapes are not necessarily the right idea for the home user, but that doesn't mean they're dead. What we're already seeing in industry, and this will become more and more standard, is staging data to large disk stores first, and then archiving it off to tape (for longevity and off-site storage.) This is good for the user, since recent data is very quickly available. It's also good for the tapes and tape drives, since backing from a local machine is faster and keeps the tape drives streaming.
Dave
The hardware mentioned in this article is pretty slick, and it looks like something I expected would raise slashdot's eyebrow. However, there's a big element of backups that article almost entirely dismissed:
Software.
What you really have are 20+ machines, with independent IPs, system configs, and lots of DAS (direct attached storage,) with no mention about how to seemlessly make these appear to be the 70GB data store. Or where to find the machine / drive / volume that has the data you need. Or how to tell your backup clients to communicate with the hive of machines.
Good backups and restores are more dependent on the software that drives them rather than the hardware they're serviced by. That article, albeit cool to see their home-grown environment, sailed right by that point.
It mentioned something about clients connect to one of the nodes that acts as the server, but then what? Does the server NFS mount all of those remote drives? So all of the traffic from the clients is throttled to the server's GigE card? (Coming in from the client, and back out again to the backup slave?) OR, does the server delegate the backup to one of the slaves. But then how does the server know what data is where?
If they've really designed that great of a software backup package, that can make that system slickly manage that many backup slaves, they should market the software. That's more a challenge than the hardware!
Dave
http://customersupport.tivo.com/tivoknowbase/root/ public/tv451619.htm?
HD support from TiVo is coming RSN... I think I heard rumors on the community forums about HD support by year end, but who knows if that's accurate? (And they never said which year ending....)
Dave
OTOH, that doesn't mean that short-sighted tech companies won't slash their internship programs or otherwise leave techies out in the cold. I was supposed to have an engineering internship at On Semiconductor (a Motorola spin-off) paying about $20/hour during the summer of 2001. Unfortunately, the semiconductor industry collapsed that spring, and On cut their entire internship program in addition to cutting lots of permanent positions.
I've heard of places that increase their intern program when money is tight and full-time employees are laid off/understaffed. Bang for buck, interns are cheap for the companies. It sucks when you're looking for full-time jobs, and the companies are only hiring interns!
-JG
It's not only a concern that physical media may become obsolete, but also the algorithms in which data is encoded on the media. We have lots of old backup media (reel to reel tape, 8mm tapes) at work that are probably still readable, but no one knows how the data was encoded on that media (or more importantly,) what information is on which tape.
Most commercial tape backup solutions have proprietary encoding solutions, and who knows if that company is going to be in business/supported in 50 years. In fact, for true(r) long-term storage, it's recommended to copy the data from the commercial tape backup solution copy to plain old tar.
Keeping an archive on media that will be around in 50 years seems like a minor point compared to finding the exact tape with the right data you need in a format you can still decode.
-JG
I used to mouse entirely with my left hand (I'm left handed.) I've switched now to almost always mousing with my right hand. Because I hop between so many shared computers, moving the mouse got to be a pain so I just got used to using the mouse with my right.
That works for all applications, except games. I've tried, and I just suck too much with my non-primary hand mousing in Quake. That's one application where you've got to switch it over.
FWIW, they do have left handed mice that are contoured to fit 'us', but they generally don't have a wheel so I wouldn't consider one.