Re: off-site backup
On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 11:39:47AM -0400, dtutty@porchlight.ca wrote:
> The encased USB laptop drive option in where I'm leaning after last
> night's research. Looking at how fragile a DLT cartridge is (basically
> drop it and its broke/unreliable even if it looks ok) compared to
> several drive enclosures that say they protect the drive at 1 m onto
> concrete, it makes the point.
>
> I was especially interested to find that the cost difference between a
> DLT cartridge and a comparible disk drive is getting smaller all the
> time. One wonders how long tape will be cost-effective even for
> large-scale archiving.
>
> I had wondered about the shelf-life of hard drives compared to DLT but
> since so many big names are making disk-based virtual tape drives, it
> suggests that they are comparable.
>
> Not that I'm puting data on a media (tape, drive, whatever) and leaving
> it for 10 years. I'm keeping the data current by cycling media through
> attached-shelf-bank monthly. Critical data that always needs to be
> up-to-date I'll probably use USB sticks for. Those files are plain-text
> so that they can be read from any computer that can mount the USB stick.
> It seems that USB sticks/flash-drives are far more rugged than anything
> other than paper. What have you found?
>
> At this point, I hadn't considered using the raid1 system to mirror
> everything onto the drive but that does make a lot of sense at least for
> the base system to keep a working snapshot off-site.
>
> Since my MB has an eSATA port on the back, I would like to use it for
> the backup, although I also have USB and Firewire. What is it that is
> keeping eSATA from being hot-swapable? Is there an ETA on this?
The only thing keeping almost all sata ports from being hotswap, is lack
of hotswap support for sata in the linux kernel. It works on hardware
raid controllers that manage it themselves, while it doesn't for plain
sata controllers where the kernel has to manage it, since no one has
written the code to handle it yet although I believe someone is working
on it, although who knows how actively they are doing it. Electically
the hotswap works fine on sata, it's just the software needs to
recognize insertions and removals which it doesn't right now. USB
hotswap of course does work, as does firewire.
You can get more info on sata state here: http://linux-ata.org/
Software and hardware status report both mention stuff about hotplug but
I can't acutally tell if it says it works or doesn't work yet.
> Len, have you written a book or anything?
Not that I know of. :)
> Thanks for your wisdom,
Or random ramblings...
--
Len Sorensen
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