Re: tlug: CD-R under Linux

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> OTOH, use of tape has decades of experience behind it.

Yeah, that's how we know tape is not totally reliable :-)

> I'm also reluctant to trust stuff that's mostly used in Japan, like MO
> and Panasonic PD.  I don't know anybody here at Tsukuba that I can

I've never had a PD (don't even know exactly what it is), but I used MO
for backups for about a year when I worked at 3Web, and never had a
problem with it.  YMMV, of course.  As a general rule, I would
inherently trust any kind of (non-floppy) disk more than tape.  The
durability is just a lot better.

> trust for advice about this kind of thing; the hard core people at the
> main CC and the admin database use redundant tape backups on DAT
> drives (eg) that cost more than any of my workstations, everybody else

DAT is, of course, quite good.  It also has the advantage of being quite
big.  If you have a lot of stuff to backup, you want to be able to set a
backup tape and forget it.  If you use MO, that means sitting there and
doing a lot of disk shuffling to get a backup done.  If an 8 GB DAT
ain't big enough, there are always auto-loaders.

OK, I once saw an MO jukebox that could do about 20 GB unattended, but
I doubt they ever sold many of those.  And of course, if you fill it
up on every backup, that's a lot of MO disks, a lot of space, a lot of
money, and a lot of work.  In a really high-vol situation, I'd choose
DAT, too.  For home use, however, I think MO would be a fast and
reliable alternative at a lower cost than DAT.

Right now I just run disk-to-disk backup every night, but some day I'll
get my tape drive hooked up again, too.

Jonathan Byrne                                   Engineering Division
Global Online Japan                              http://www.gol.com/
Tel:  +81 03-5334-1700   Fax: +81-03-5334-1701   Direct: +81-03-5334-1756


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