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Old October 13th 04, 06:25 PM
GSV Three Minds in a Can
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Bitstring s.com, from
the wonderful person David X said
What is the cost of DVD storage in the UK? I am in the UK so my figures
reflect UK prices. I want to store data not music.

I would welcome any comments on my posting.


Don't cross-post to so many groups (many people kill anything
crossposted to 3 places, on the assumption that if the OP doesn't know
which group it goes it, it won't be of much interest in any of them).

Back to the question .. cost per byte is not an interesting metric for
backups, unless you include the cost of making the backup and the cost
of securing it against whatever disaster you are backing up against.

For HDD failure protection, the simplest solution (and cheapest) is
'second copy' to another drive elsewhere on the network, or even on the
same PC. The downside is that many disasters apart from a disk crash can
take out both copies (theft, fire, lightning). The other downside is you
only have one identical copy, so there is no archival ability (e.g.
'oops I trashed that file yesterday, it's been copied to the backup
which is now trashed too, I need a copy from last week).

For proper backup you need an offsite copy .. tape or DVD or CDR will
all work, just make sure you can read the backups on whatever machine to
may need to restore them on. Tapes can be picky about being read on
other machines, and can be picky about being read at all if badly stored
for a long time. Another option is 'backup across the www' to a storage
server in a secure location .. they'll be backing that up to tape,
hopefully.

Unless you have large capacity tapes, it is pretty stupid to back up
anything more than critical data. People gaily make disk images of their
whole system, but unless you can produce =identical= hardware this is of
no use at all if your original system is stolen, burns to the ground, or
whatever. If you have the original applications on CD, or you can buy
new copies from MS, there isn't much point in wasting time and money
making copies every day/week for the rest of your life.

In a perfect world, RAID1 or RAID5 for continuous up-time even if a disk
crashes (which they are increasingly prone to do), tape backups of
anything that can't be reproduced easily .. daily ones, or weekly, or
whatever turns out to be the best tradeoff between 'cost of prevention'
and 'cost of recovering what you hadn't prevented being lost'.

--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Outgoing Msgs are Turing Tested,and indistinguishable from human typing.