Re: Help!!! undelete for ext3fs!!!
On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 06:28:30PM -0600, Cheryl Homiak wrote:
> [snip] As
> for backups, I'm really sorry but i can't figure out what a MO disk is.
I think this is tech speak for a magneto-optical disk, which is a rare
beast that I've never actually seen, only heard about. You may google
the web for more info about them.
> Unfortunately, the only facilities I have right now for doing backup of
> any kind is the old floppy, and I probably should have had this data on
> floppy.
Take it from someone who lived in DOS World for over ten years, floppy
backup is about as good as no backup at all. Maybe worse, since you
might have a false sense of security. Floppies are hideously unreliable,
and just too small to back up present-day large hard disks.
The only thing I use floppies for nowadays is to pass small files to
friends who don't have Net connections, and for emergency boot disks.
And I always make *three* of those at a crack, since I'm as likely to
find a corrupted sector on the diskette when I need it as I am to boot
a kernel. They like to fail at the most inconvenient times.
> I'd love to have a backup system, and you'll get no argument from
> me against its importance, but the reality is that I don't have one right
> now.
CD-Rs work okay for people who don't have large amounts of data to back
up, and they are an inexpensive solution.
For large amounts of data, tape, preferably SCSI, would seem to be a
common recommendation from the old hands on Linux lists. Problem is
that a drive that can back up a large disk won't be cheap. Add the
cost of a set of tapes to rotate backups, and the cost of a good SCSI
board if you don't already have a SCSI channel on your machine, and
you're talking a good chunk of change.
I use a poor man's remedy: I back up to my second hard drive. This
is a "cold swap" IDE drive. I have one disk in the bay to which I
back up, and two extra to rotate. One is always off-site at my locker
at work, and I tote them back and forth when I go to work to rotate
the backups. Since the backups are compressed, and I don't back up
anything I can recreate from my Debian installation CDs, I can get
away with smaller drives for the backup bay than for the primary disk.
The backup disks have either been cannibalized from older systems, or
bought for cheap at used computer shops. Not an ideal solution, by
any means, but it "works" for some values of "works". At least
I can back up everything that needs backing up on a single medium,
so unattended backups are possible, and the disk-to-disk transfers
are pretty fast. And it was a lot cheaper than DDS.
Just $0.02 worth.
Cordially,
Mark S. Reglewski
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