Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 18:42:58 -0700 (PDT) From: Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net> To: Arcady Genkin <a.genkin@utoronto.ca> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why use tape for backups? (was: backup method reccommendation?) Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9910101827110.16508-100000@orion.ac.hmc.edu> In-Reply-To: <87iu4etzlp.fsf_-_@main.wgaf.net>
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On 10 Oct 1999, Arcady Genkin wrote: > This discussion of backups to tape reminded me that I have always > wondered, why do some people chose tape as backup solution for desktop > pc's. > > It seems to me that it's much cheaper, faster, and more reliable to > just buy another hard drive and dedicate it for backups. > > Is there any reasons tapes are a better choice? Several. - Try doing an offsite, archival backup with a HD. You can do it, but it certaintly isn't cheap. - Try keeping multiple versions of a nearly full disk with a HD. - Disk controlers and/or cables can and do fail in messy ways which eat drives (I has a Sun SPARC 5 that ate 3-4 disks before we has Sun replace the mother board, and a friend of mine had a drive cable go bad such that it mangled his disks quite consistantly), if you backup is sitting on your shelf, no system failure which doesn't burn the house down is going to touch it. - If you're a normal IDE user, what if you have two full disks to backup, with a CDROM drive around, you can't add enough HDs to do backups on. - If you're a SCSI user with more then one fast disk you're allready into the range where tapes are cheaper. In summary, if you really care about your data, hard drives are likely a more expensive option. Anyway, who wants to end up with only one machine anyway. ;-) -- Brooks To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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