Looking for backup software of complete system

[James Wilkinson]

John Thompson wrote:
> A good tape system is quite reliable; that's why tape backup is still 
> the gold standard in enterprise class installations.  The initial outlay 
> for such a system can be higher than CD-RW, but the incremental cost of 
> adding media is lower and the media itself has a more proven track 
> record than CD-RW.

Well, there are a couple of other considerations for companies, like
cost per megabyte over "enough" tapes, especially where the company
wants to keep one backup per month in perpetuity. That tends to rule out
replacing tapes with IDE disks. Besides, it's not clear enough what
happens if you unplug a bunch of hard disks and store them in a safe for
ten years. Will they still spin up? Will there still be computers with
the right interface?

And CD-RW is right out because it doesn't have the capacity. DVD±RW
effectively is, too. What you would need in a corporate setting is a
robot capable of loading maybe twenty or a hundred DVD±RWs (or ±Rs) into
a writer consecutively, and burning them, and proving that they were
good, and storing them suitably. Come to that, you'd probably need
several writers to get the backup job done in a suitable timeframe. And
in many cases, you only need one wrong for the entire database to be
unusable.

This doesn't necessarily map to a home setting.

Most people don't have that much data that they need to store on a daily
basis.  A hard drive is much cheaper than a tape drive, so buy one of
those *if* you need the occasional system-level backup[1], and connect it
when necessary. (Hey, get an external USB enclosure: it's still
cheaper).

Most people can then happily store the data that has changed and that
they care about on a CD-R or a DVD. For just one of them, in my
experience, the reliability is pretty similar (I've had enough tapes and
tape drives from different manufacturers go wrong, thank you very much).

James.

[1] My point of view is that my home PC isn't mission-critical, and I'd
rather take the opportunity to install the OS from scratch, rather than
restore it from backup. If I did want to make sure I had a PC available
straight after a crash, I'd get my old desktop over, keep it up to date,
and just switch machines.


-- 
E-mail address: james | When the revolution comes, we'll need a longer wall.
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |     -- Tom De Mulder