hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 09:12:17AM -0800, Bob McGowan wrote:Ron Johnson wrote:-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
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Shouldn't the answer to the general question of backup media include the concept of 'archival'?*REALLY BAD*: your business did regular backups to the same media!! _Always_ have multiple backup media and rotate between them. (The "enterprise" learned that decades ago during the era of 9-track tapes, which were prone to read and write failures. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFF5thKS9HxQb37XmcRAogkAKCo/QkutJttuHLHUFvMcebySpuENgCeJpjy ItY61luQGgJCLqLto3G9jLc= =WVUn -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----I've always considered the questions of backup and archiving to be orthogonal, even though the tools used are often the same.If you don't back up your archive, you risk losing it. -- hendrik
Ah, English, ain't it grand!You are using the term 'archive' as in an 'archive file', such as you would get with zip or ar (as well as tar, ...) and which is probably stored on your system's hard disk.
I'm using the term as a description of the quality of the media being used to do the storage. As an example, but from a totally different arena, archival storage of a photographic print requires photo paper with low acid content, storage in a controlled environment, no contact with other photos, and so on.
So, by 'archival', I was referring mostly to the lifetime of the medium used to make the backup. My question not only included the concept of lifetime, however. It also includes the concept of ease of deletion of the files. A read-only medium has higher archival quality than a read-write medium, simply because you can accidentally delete files from read-write media.
Since it's quite easy to accidentally delete a file on a hard disk, using a hard disk as a back up medium (whether you call it a backup or an archive) is not the safest place to put important backups, it would seem to me. It is only useful as an intermediate step, moving from volatile storage to "permanent" storage.
Granted, it's possible to 'delete' a file or backup by physically destroying the medium used, but that is a bit harder to do accidentally. And, it's why there are off site storage facilities, for the *really* important stuff.
Bob
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