Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 04:18:11PM -0600, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:hat I think of as "minimum acceptable" backup is two offline volumes to accept backups, used alternately. Anything less leaves you with all copies of your data online and vulnerable at once -- to a power surge, lightning strike, malware, or idiot sysadmin ("rm -rf /").Right, but this is on-line (or near-line) backup. The data on the media doesn't have to last long, only between backup cycles. What about archives? Or, do you just keep everything on-line (buy more disks for the computer and bigger USB drives for backups) and do backups and never archive anything?
I've been relying primarily on offline archives until very recently, but I'm *now* primarily relying on the mirrored disks in the server plus two external backup drives. I keep everything online, disk is so cheap it's silly not to, and keeping track of all the little bits and pieces is much easier in the computer than as physical CDs I have to find to look at an old photo. I currently expect I'll keep making at least one copy of the optical media archives (I used to make two, and I haven't formally stopped making two*yet*) for the off-site copy.
Every few years some of it needs to be rethought, since prices and available sizes keep fluctuating.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info