[X4U] Better Backup?

[Robert MacLeay]

Hello, Mark and Tim!

I never made it to AIT; I jumped ship when I got fed up with DDS-4.

Tapes are just too damned expensive today, the tape drives are delicate and
even more expensive, and there is a real concern about future driver
availability.  Add to that a lot of people's concern about Dantz's handling
of Retrospect and I would say "get out while you still can."

On a cost-per-gigabyte basis, a new, large hard disk in a cheapie external
drive beats tape media hands-down, even ignoring the equipment and software
overhead of tapes. It is a couple orders of magnitude faster, offers longer
storage life, will be hardware-compatible with new computers for the
foreseeable future, and is compatible with a huge assortment of backup
utilities.

Buying hard disks and then using them just for storage may require an
emotional adjustment for those of us who've been in computing since ancient
times, but really, they are the cost-effective option.

DVDs are even cheaper, but can we really trust them to last? The labor
overhead involved in burning them is much higher than with hard disks, which
offsets the media cost, also.

--
Robert MacLeay
Freelance editorial and creative services
http://tinyurl.com/2zlf8


    


On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:17:00 -0500, Mark Des Cotes <mark at astroprinting.com>
wrote:

> We're looking into updating/revamping our backup system. Not only the
> backup of our workstations but more importantly the backup of our
> vast archive of past jobs and customer files. Currently we copy
> completed jobs to a file server with two mirrored HDs. We then use
> Retrospect to first backup the drives and then use it again to
> archive the files (copies the files to tape then deletes them from
> the drive). We are using AIT-2 tapes as our backup media. Our AIT
> drive is getting a bit old and we would like to upgrade it before it
> fails us. I'm wondering if there's any new and better options
> available to us? Or or should we stick to AIT-2 and just purchase a
> new AIT drive?