If you work with tape every day and test your backups, you can probably be assured that your tapes will restore fine. However, most people do not. They either unknowingly, or knowingly do not test their tapes. Testing tapes requires you to read from them, did I mention how slow that is? Hard Drives are a tried and true solution for most people under the 50TB mark. I don't argue that tape has a place, however, it's place is not small business or home users.
Yes, but I can backup most small businesses completely, with redundancy, for less then or equal to the cost of 1 tape drive. If I ever need to restore a 1TB server I will be done in afew hours, you will still be running your tape restore the next day (and probably the day after that too).
His solution would be better if he recommended putting in the drives and using rsync or a similar command to mirror the data. ZFS is too new for archives and RAID introduces too much complexity.
That's why archive need to be maintained. I could have moved the same data, verified it, and maintained it for 20 years and still spent less then someone invested in one tape drive.
Maybe we care about recovery time? Tape backup is substantially slower then hard drive backup. Recovery time is a nightmare. Even recovering one file take forever on tape compared to HD.
Offline HD has replaced tape for almost every application. It is so much cheaper and more reliable. The only place tape makes sense is extremely large data sets that use robotic tape changers, and something I want to vault for 30 years. No other technology can sit for 30 years and still have a very good chance of being readable.
Stay away from RAID, mirror the data with Rsync or something similar so that you have a chance to catch corruption. If this is archival data it should not be changing that often. You only need to refresh your mirror when you change your data.
Agreed, RAID is a waste of time for most people. Never use it on a desktop, consider it for a server, but not for an archival server. RAID will just propagate any errors to both drives and SATA drives are fast enough that your network will be the bottleneck.
A partial list of thing we do at gunpoint according to your argument (people with guns will come and lock you up, eventually, after all other avenues have been exhausted):
* pay taxes
* pay rent / mortgage
* not beat up people I disagree with
* pay for groceries
* wear clothes
* feed our children
* pay for a haircut
Hard drives are the cheapest storage. Put some Terabyte drives in a computer and add a removable drive slot. Put your data on the drives, RAID is a waste of time. SATA is fast enough for most people.
If this is archival data that does not change, create a schedule where you back it up once a month, once a quarter, or annually depending on value. The backup will be to a drive you put in and then remove for offline storage. You can so some fancy Hard-linking of backups to maintain versioning, or you can encrypt your backups. The most important part is that they are in two locations, live on your server, and on an offline hard drive. You may consider hashing data to check for corruption.
This setup is fast, it's easy to access, it's not expensive, and it provides robust data security. You should reevaluate in 5 years, purge unnecessary data, or see if better options have appeared.
Check out my site, I specialize in this sort of setup.
In another 5 years they will be able to pay off their (still deferred) loans with the wheelbarrow of money they get for an allowance, or they could buy a loaf of bread instead...
his gf make twice as much as him and he is living off a nest egg his dear departed grandmother left him. He works 15-20 hours a week because he is too cool to hold a real job, it interferes with his band / mountain biking / kyaking / masturbation....
Mom and Dad have picked up any medical bills and probably own his house and rent to him at well below market rate.
This is true. I feel bad calling my pediatrician for simple advice, because I know she is not getting compensated. There are alot of things that can be taken care of by email or phone, but our system is not designed to function this way.
That's pretty rare, it seems that quite often children raised a by a single parent or adoptive parents go on lengthy quests to find their biological parent. I can understand it even if I think it is stupid. I've seen them do things very hurtful to the people who raised them so they can get affection from some douche that happened to squirt them, or part of them, out.
I've been thinking of putting a linux partition setup as a PXE server on my laptop for just such an occasion. Pack a crossover cable, or a little switch and your in business.
Every distribution you list is based on debian or worse (ubuntu). I have OpenSUSE machines that have run for 5 years with no problems, I update them and they work. My time is also pretty valuable, and not only my paid time. I have 3 children under the age of 9 on Linux, plus my wife. It just works for them and they don't get viruses. Any problems I have ever encountered ar during the initial build. Once it works, it works.
Ubunti is know for screwing things up with updates. There are plenty of more conservative distributions. OpenSUSE and Fedora are more cutting edge, but OpenSUSE provides a reasonable support timeframe for their releases. Puppy linux is a great one for long term support of older hardware.
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If you work with tape every day and test your backups, you can probably be assured that your tapes will restore fine. However, most people do not. They either unknowingly, or knowingly do not test their tapes. Testing tapes requires you to read from them, did I mention how slow that is? Hard Drives are a tried and true solution for most people under the 50TB mark. I don't argue that tape has a place, however, it's place is not small business or home users.
Yes, but I can backup most small businesses completely, with redundancy, for less then or equal to the cost of 1 tape drive. If I ever need to restore a 1TB server I will be done in afew hours, you will still be running your tape restore the next day (and probably the day after that too).
expectancy doesn't do much for me...
His solution would be better if he recommended putting in the drives and using rsync or a similar command to mirror the data. ZFS is too new for archives and RAID introduces too much complexity.
well said!
That's why archive need to be maintained. I could have moved the same data, verified it, and maintained it for 20 years and still spent less then someone invested in one tape drive.
Maybe we care about recovery time?
Tape backup is substantially slower then hard drive backup. Recovery time is a nightmare. Even recovering one file take forever on tape compared to HD.
Offline HD has replaced tape for almost every application. It is so much cheaper and more reliable. The only place tape makes sense is extremely large data sets that use robotic tape changers, and something I want to vault for 30 years. No other technology can sit for 30 years and still have a very good chance of being readable.
Stay away from RAID, mirror the data with Rsync or something similar so that you have a chance to catch corruption. If this is archival data it should not be changing that often. You only need to refresh your mirror when you change your data.
Agreed, RAID is a waste of time for most people. Never use it on a desktop, consider it for a server, but not for an archival server. RAID will just propagate any errors to both drives and SATA drives are fast enough that your network will be the bottleneck.
At over $1k each, tape drives are out of the budget for most home users. Tape is also much slower then most people realize, much slower...
A partial list of thing we do at gunpoint according to your argument (people with guns will come and lock you up, eventually, after all other avenues have been exhausted):
* pay taxes
* pay rent / mortgage
* not beat up people I disagree with
* pay for groceries
* wear clothes
* feed our children
* pay for a haircut
Hard drives are the cheapest storage. Put some Terabyte drives in a computer and add a removable drive slot. Put your data on the drives, RAID is a waste of time. SATA is fast enough for most people.
If this is archival data that does not change, create a schedule where you back it up once a month, once a quarter, or annually depending on value. The backup will be to a drive you put in and then remove for offline storage. You can so some fancy Hard-linking of backups to maintain versioning, or you can encrypt your backups. The most important part is that they are in two locations, live on your server, and on an offline hard drive. You may consider hashing data to check for corruption.
This setup is fast, it's easy to access, it's not expensive, and it provides robust data security. You should reevaluate in 5 years, purge unnecessary data, or see if better options have appeared.
Check out my site, I specialize in this sort of setup.
In another 5 years they will be able to pay off their (still deferred) loans with the wheelbarrow of money they get for an allowance, or they could buy a loaf of bread instead...
More jobs for me...
Sad commentary, or ugly truth?
his gf make twice as much as him and he is living off a nest egg his dear departed grandmother left him. He works 15-20 hours a week because he is too cool to hold a real job, it interferes with his band / mountain biking / kyaking / masturbation....
Mom and Dad have picked up any medical bills and probably own his house and rent to him at well below market rate.
This is true. I feel bad calling my pediatrician for simple advice, because I know she is not getting compensated. There are alot of things that can be taken care of by email or phone, but our system is not designed to function this way.
but none of the HBO original content...
Showtime is talking about pulling theirs too. I also don't see any of the AMC original content like The Walking Dead.
That's pretty rare, it seems that quite often children raised a by a single parent or adoptive parents go on lengthy quests to find their biological parent. I can understand it even if I think it is stupid. I've seen them do things very hurtful to the people who raised them so they can get affection from some douche that happened to squirt them, or part of them, out.
I've been thinking of putting a linux partition setup as a PXE server on my laptop for just such an occasion. Pack a crossover cable, or a little switch and your in business.
non-standard?
it appears to be the standard for win7...
You should never trust a box that has been compromised.
However, in the real world sometimes you have to clean as much as you can and move on.
No different then a boot disc. I PXE boot mine on a segmented part of the network and go to town.
Every distribution you list is based on debian or worse (ubuntu). I have OpenSUSE machines that have run for 5 years with no problems, I update them and they work. My time is also pretty valuable, and not only my paid time. I have 3 children under the age of 9 on Linux, plus my wife. It just works for them and they don't get viruses. Any problems I have ever encountered ar during the initial build. Once it works, it works.
Ubunti is know for screwing things up with updates. There are plenty of more conservative distributions. OpenSUSE and Fedora are more cutting edge, but OpenSUSE provides a reasonable support timeframe for their releases. Puppy linux is a great one for long term support of older hardware.
There WAS a difference, conservatives need to stand up and make sure there is a difference tomorrow.