Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
My experience some years ago with 3 USB harddrives that were rotated weekly was that the disks didn't last long. 3.5" HDs do not like being moved a lot and frequently died. Moving to tape was way way more reliable but certainly had a higher cost in terms of getting a tape drive and for recovery you might need another tape drive while a USB drive works with anything.
You tend to only need spinning rust nowadays for the largest datasets, and I find that splitting archival from active filesystems helps. The archival stuff tends to be huge but write-only: media files and tarballs and such get written and then left as-is for the life of the filesystem. That requires a much-less-frequent backup! And that reduces the size of the active filesystem plus any new archival files to the point it has a chance of fitting onto flash. Another way the world has changed is that sites are no longer such islands connected by 56k modems and sneakernet; there's more chance of being able to push a backup over fibre somewhere to a harddrive that's already offsite and doesn't need to be moved further. Having another datacentre to rsync to is ideal, as I'm not sure how much you can trust third-party "cloud" solutions. -- Anthony de Boer