Backups in the modern world

Terry Stewart [terry at webweavers.co.nz] wrote: I guess you know already but I keep coming across people who think that RAID means you'll never need to backup again. Quite how they expect to recover from accidentally deleting something important beats me. In passing, I don't think that drives are *that* reliable these days. Once you're past infant mortality then I'd expect to get a good 5 years out of a drive, but that passes sooner than you'd think (or maybe people upgrade well before that happens :-)). Perhaps SSDs will change the playing field a little, but overall I doubt that reliability levels will shoot up drastically: there's always something that can be shaved slightly thinner to save a few pennies (and if things don't go wrong eventually, how can you sell them a shinier widget?). Antonio