Replacing tape changer with USB disk drives.

[Steve Bertrand]

Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>
>> Do the tapes get taken off-site, or do they sit in the same location 
>> that the servers will burn when a fire breaks out?
> 
> probably sits on place, if not he wouldn't need tape changer, but would 
> change manually :)

...not always. A tape changer in some cases is the difference between 
someone getting off of their a**, and not.

>> Once the network backup is complete, cycle this complete backup to 
>> tape which can be taken off site for longer term storage (after the 
>> network backup to 'hot' storage is done, the tape backup time becomes 
>> irrelevant).
> 
> today tapes are so expensive (not just drives, but tapes) that it's 
> better to just have many disks and swap them.

Expensive is in the eye of the beholder. I have DDS-1 tapes, in the 
drawer above my head that are from pre-2001 that I can still pull data 
from. As a matter of fact, I've never (knock on wood) experienced a bad 
tape (numerous types).

In that meantime, I've electro-magnetized dozens of platter-based hard 
disk drives that just went 'bad' (and subsequently recovered/restored 
servers from live, and tape-based backup for).

I personally don't think that swapping hard-disks (one, or many per day) 
is a viable, feasible or cost effective approach as a backup solution 
for long-term data storage, especially if you prefer to be able to 
recover the data.

Here:

- network to live storage (hourly perhaps)
- live storage to tape
   - daily
   - weekly
   - monthly
   - yearly

...cycle them in that manner. No matter what anyone says, experience 
states that I will bet on my monthly and yearly tapes as opposed to hard 
disk every time when the CFO is under pressure to get that directory 
that was 'overlooked' at last fiscal tax time.

Steve