On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 04:59:16PM -0500 or thereabouts, Wil McGilvery wrote:

I do not like using CD's because the storage is too small. Even DVD's are not quite big enough to completely back up a system. They are also cheap and you can still experience unreliability. Even the "good" cd's are still too unreliable for me.

When I first got started I used dat tapes and sold some to customers. That was a big mistake. I was replacing the tape drive every year and once I had a new tape drive it was a crap shoot as to whether I could perform a restore or not from an old tape.

If you are backing up your own data on your own system at your house then do what ever works because obviously price is a consideration, but if you are responsible for mission critical data, don't go cheap. It is just not worth it. Spend the money and do it properly.

Like I said before, you get what you pay for.

I'm surprised to hear you say that DVD's aren't quite big enough... I'm in the digital asset business, and we gave tape up a long time ago. We use DVD with a jukebox, and the whole thing is automated in terms of doing the actual backup, we have no issue carrying over files that fill up one disk to another, the software is intelligent enough to know where all the parts are. Our backups each day aren't tiny... -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml