21 May
2007
21 May
'07
3:38 a.m.
Tim Shoppa wrote:
"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at
gmail.com> wrote:
Jerome Fine replies:
One other factor, which to a major extent may also be
considered convenience, is the time to perform the backup
as well as the recovery. While I admit to knowing far
too little about the Windows (jeck) system I use, there
unfortunately seems to be little choice unless I want
to spend the next year or two getting up to speed with
a system I dislike in the first place OR switching too
something more reasonable, but also having to completely
set up and support it myself. But I have found that
using Ghost (with a FAT32 file structure - this allows
the backup to also produce a separate ascii list of all
12,000 files) to perform backups solves most of my problems.
Since I have only 2 GB of files on my C: drive, the backup
takes only 5 minutes. In addition, the restore takes only
3 minutes and I frequently make use of this minimal restore
time to use applications that (from my point of view) mess
up the file system - after which I simply do a restore.
One additional note. Since the backup image is compressed to
less than 1 GB and drive capacity of 100 GB is so inexpensive,
I don't even bother with tape, but instead use 2 extra hard
drives, each if which has a copy of the backup image. And
while I have only had to make use of having BOTH backup drives
about once a year over the past 5 years (most recently when both
backup drives failed within about 4 months of each other),
the extra redundancy of having 2 backup drives has proved to
be worth the cost of the extra drive hundreds of times over.
The other aspect that I consider worth mentioning is that I
also save a permanent copy of the backup image file from the
end of each month on a DVD after which I erase all the previous
months of backups from the backup hard drives. While I realize
that my solution will not apply to systems which have more than
about 10 GB of files to backup, with my situation it works very
well indeed.
Note that at one time when I was using hard drives of only
600 MB, I did use a DLT tape of a limited capacity (only
256 MB which required 3 tapes for a complete backup). Since
I also verified each tape against the original data, those
backups took the better part of a whole day. Now with Ghost
and a hard drive, the initial backup takes 5 minutes and
making that second copy takes an additional minute. I call
that convenience.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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I guess another way to phrase this might be, does
anyone on the list
know of a source of extremely inexpensive piles of DLT IV or SDLT
tapes - either density media quickly adds up to more than the present
cost of drives, so in the end, it's the weight of the tapes that's the
limiting factor.
For data backup, it's a false economy to compare the cost of the
backup media to the cost of other backup media or to the cost
of gas or to the cost of tea in China.
The true comparison is the cost of making a backup vs the cost of
not making a backup.
For more than a decade folks have argued about the cost of backup media
vs another backup media, and ignored the cost vs value of doing
the backup at all. The cost of the media has been in the noise
compared to the effort involved for a long long time, at least for
those of us in the West. (Maybe things are different in former
Eastern Block countries or subsaharan Africa, not that living at
the South Pole might distort any of our senses of economics!)
For almost any application, the convenience vs inconvenience of the
backup is going to drive any consideration more than the cost of the
media. DLT does have a very good advantage over others in convenience
in that there is a good (although not perfect) history of drives
being backwards compatible over ridiculously long time spans.
There are OTHER factors - I made backups onto 9-tracks into the late
90's mostly as a justification for keeping dozens of drives around, not
so much because it was the best or right way! If you want to pick
up the tapes as a way of justifying keeping the DLT drive around,
that's great: well into the late 90's I was still stockpiling vast
quantities of Blackwatch tape (I mean, thousands of tape in a haul)
just as part of my spinning tape reel obsession :-). But once the other
non-economic factors come in, you have to acknowledge that you are
no longer making decisions based solely on some hypothetical economic
factor and abandon the economic comparisons.