On Jul 1, 2006, at 11:52 PM, David E. Fox wrote: [Long discourse on backups and how they were done ten years ago.]
2. External hard disks are slightly less portable than DVD's. 3. External hard disks *might* take up slightly more phhysical space over DVD's, depending on the size/density of the disk.And you can't really just plug them in (hotswap) as easily either. They're more of a permanently "there" setup. OTOH, several years ago I visited a local shop where they had these external "cage" things whereyou could just plug an HD in from the outside, and not have to open the case. Of course, you can simply connect a USB or firewire drive withouthaving to open the case, and likely without having to power down the system to change drives.
I think part of this chain is my comments. I was definitely referring to USB or FIrewire drives. Those removable trays are useless for backups, as they require system downtime to swap them. Nothing needs that nowadays.
Plug in a USB drive, rsync, unplug it and store is somewhere safe. Done.
Anything else is a waste of time, which is the most precious thing you have. People with nothing better to do mess around with removable/optical/tape media today.
Disk is CHEAP now. Hard disks are running $0.33 US a Gig or lower these days.
-- Nate Duehr nate@natetech.com