OT: Tape less Backup System

[Fairlight]

At Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:02:09PM -0500 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bill Vermillion was observed uttering:
> 
> > In a corporate business environment, $1200 isn't much. In a
> > small business or worse, personal environment, decent capacity
> > and performance tape is still woefully overpriced, IMHO.
> 
> In personal it is expensive.  But in a small business it's just
> like insurance.  And if you figure on only a 4 year life that's
> only $1 day.  Being able to get a system up and running in
> a matter of hours with all your data current through the previous
> close of business is almost mandatory.  

Just how often have -you- needed tape backups?  The first time I've
-needed- tape backups besides today (from which I recovered due to fast
fingers and a thorough knowledge of what files I needed to reconstruct--in
less than an hour.  The -last- time I needed a tape drive for real was in
about 1998.  Once every six years.  Ain't worth it to me.

Like I said, everything I do that's -truly- important is multi-homed
anyway.  I may have it on Cobalt, but it's also on IgLou's shell server,
and they have Network Appliance RAID, complete with hourly snapshots 9
times a day.  And they make tape backups daily.

> If you lose the data you'll never have to worry about
> your accounts-payable as all the vendors will be more than happy to
> send you bills - in the meantime you can't send any bills out.

Quicken fits quite nicely on a CD, much less a DVD.  We use CDRW's.

> A good crash can take some companies out of business.  

Crashes are never good.  :)

> Backups are NOT expensive if you do any business at all IF
> the business depends upon the data.

All of my essential data is so small that a simple rsync propogation or
burn to a single CDRW will do it.

As it is, since I got turned on to rsync, I've thought it's the next best
thing since sliced bread.  I love it.  Except when I accidentally put a /
on the end of something that I -didn't- want the / on.  That's actually
dangerous.  I'm thinking they should have made the behaviour a switch, not
relied upon syntactical typing of your data source path.  Of anything in
rsync, that's -the- most likely thing to bite someone, IMHO.

mark->
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