OT: SLR 5 Tape drive vs DAT

[Bill Campbell]

...lots of old quotes dropped.

We have been using external FireWire hard disks for backups now for several
years with good results.  Today a 160GB external drive with FireWire and
USB2 support costs about $200USD at CompUSA, and a host adapter is about
$50 if your machine doesn't support it.  If you don't have an OS that
supports Firewire, Fry's sells a decent Linux box which, with 512MB extra
RAM costs under $300USD.  Rotating five external drives for backups brings
the total cost to about $1,300.

We generally backup using rsync to appropriate directories on the external
drive(s) with at least one directory per machine being backed up.  We
backup Windows machines by sharing the drive(s) they want to back up, then
mounting these on the Linux server so *NO* special software is required on
the Windows box.

Having the backups on mountable hard drives makes restoration a breeze.

Proper planning for emergency restoration can make life a lot easier when
disaster falls.  Things like using a nightly ``ap'' dump on OpenServer
systems so one can create all the user data quickly on a new machine,
keeping all data and non-vendor programs out of the root file system (e,g.
in /usr/local or /home), and copies of the entire /etc directory are very
useful when things fall apart.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
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URL: http://www.celestial.com/

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