24 Sep
2015
24 Sep
'15
3:18 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 11:36:57AM -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 09/15/2015 10:49 AM, Mouse wrote:
Yeah, that is one of the canonical mistakes. I've seen tape backup
setups that had _the_ backup tape, which was overwritten for every
backup run. They might as well not have bothered ...
If the police needed to even _consider_ doing
that, they need to fire
whoever decided they didn't need proper backups. (And whoever was
responsible for the mistake that got it running there to begin with,
either whoever decided to let it run or whoever decided to use tools
that would let it run, depending.)
I think a more important issue in backing up is "How many
GENERATIONS to you keep around?" If you're just overwriting last
month's backup, you could be propagating the effects of a malware or
just plain error with no means of retrieval. My backups are currently done by connecting an
external drive to a
system, and booting with a live CD. Important stuff is also
duplicated on several different machines--and when new technology
obsoletes the old, carry the content forward on the newer medium.
I back up my original work or valuable reference sources. No
pictures or movies. When you consider how much *original* work
anyone does during a lifetime, it's surprisingly little.
Well, the backup for the digital camera archive currently _fills_ two
LTO3 tapes (with the wife and me both keeping DSLRs busy, that is not
a surprise).
Maybe that's changed today. I remember seeing a
figure of 11
debugged lines of code per day per programmer as the average for a
GSA programmer back in the 1980s.
---------------
Related to the subject of backup devices, I've been seeing
stupid-low prices on SSD using MLC flash. How reliable are these
things? I'm still of the spinning rust persuasion, right now.
Don't trust flash for backups. With rotating rust, backups to cold
storage (i.e. connect drive, write data, disconnect, store it) works
pretty well. With flash ... well. The deeper one digs into how flash
storage is done these days, the less one tends to trust it. Do you
really trust what is effectively down to a handful of electrons trapped
in a tiny cell with a very thin insulator hanging around forever?
Yeah, me neither. There is a reason my workstation has a hybrid RAID1
for the rootfs: spinning rust + flash drive, with the spinning rust
set to 'write mostly'. Gets me the speed of flash and the more proven
long term stability of spinning rust.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison