Re: Backup device:Tape vs CD-RW

From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel@bellatlantic.net)
Date: 01/21/03 

From: "Nico Kadel-Garcia" <nkadel@bellatlantic.net>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 04:44:38 GMT

"Gaétan Martineau" <gmarti@mediom.qc.ca> wrote in message
news:3E2CBB17.1090000@mediom.qc.ca...
> Strange conversation, minutes ago, with a computer vendor. I asked for
> his advice, got quite surprised, and finally submit here my question to
> your kind knowledge or experience to finally get another feedback.
>
> Problem:
> I am about to change computer and think, in the process, of also buying
> a *good, safe and easy* backup solution for personal use at home.
>
> What I think is:
> I am interested in a tape drive for 8mm mammoth 20 Gb exabyte
> cartridges. a) It stores plenty b) It would backup data on our home LAN
> (3 computers) through NFS and maybe smbtar c) it would backup (through
> crontab) automatically except for feeding the cartridge into the drive
> and store it away afterwards d) this type of cartridge is compatible
> with what I use at work (for seismic research) so I can finally easily
> exchange data. e) I can keep a whole M$ partition on an exabyte and if
> virus comes, "tar xvzf" will take care of the rest. So no antivirus ***
> to maintain or worry about. f) Pretty well same for linux;(except for
> viruses) I can keep a complete Linux install on a cartridge, so if I
> want to do the spring clean up, I can batch restore a "tar xvzf" instead
> of interactively reinstalling from CD's.
>
> What he said was:
> Tape drives are not so much used anymore nowadays. A good solution is to
> use a 650 Mbytes CD-RW. You format it and then backing up your stuff is
> just a matter of "drag and drop" from the Windows explorer. Cheap,
> convenient. And you do not need as much as 20Gb. You do not backup your
> programs. You don't need to do that; it does not happen often that the
> whole computer goes wreck.
>
> What do you think??? I am about to buy a 60 Gb hard drive and the
> proposed backup solution is : ... 650Mb CD-RW

He's got a point. Many folks don't bother doing full system backups these
days, and the size of the drive is irrelevant. It's the size of the *dump*,
and if you just keep your desired data, you can shrink the dumps to a more
reasonable size (CD-R or CD-RW is quite cheap and quite stable).

With Linux, though, you can restore the system trivially from tar tapes, and
you don't need to buy Legato or something expensive to do it with. I
recommend the "amanda" backup system, for whatever you choose to back up.

Also, if you're backing up Windows stuff, be aware that the NTFS permissions
are not easily captured by Linux tools. NTFS is too wacky and deliberately
unstable to interfere with M$ competition to write completely reliable
drivers forr...