Best HD make for PC

[The Natural Philosopher]

Theres no point on backing up all the malware and viruses on Windows.

[Tim Streater]

The way you back up on Windows is to re-install.

[Clive George]

Hmmmm. I think I'd say it is in fact "yes, on windows" - it's a normal windows program. Cygwin was something rather heavier - an entire environment - and "or something" implies similar. But this isn't really important.

[Clive George]

I think you've just revealed you don't know.

May I suggest perusing the man page to find out the rather important differences, one of which means what you said above really doesn't apply.

You could at least put some basic effort into not making yourself look stupid - it's embarrassing seeing people who claim to know things make such elementary mistakes.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

That's what we call the operating system.

[dennis]

Its a stream compressor that can compress anything including the output from tar.

What mistake?

[Clive George]

Which means it's _not_ the gnu version of zip.

See above.

[Perry (News)]

On Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:37:32 -0000, "dennis@home" waxed lyrical about:

This is something I know a fair bit about - try googling 'Guardian TeleVault', they are an award-winning remote backup and Disaster Recovery provider.

I work for a Lloyd's-based insurance syndicate and we use TeleVault for our data backups - all of our Tier1 backup data is held on disk, Tier2/3 go to tape.

With the FSA breathing down our necks we have to use something that is reliable, resilient and accepted by the FSA as stable and secure - does that qualify as 'important' data then Dennis?

[dave]

Well that's The Labour Party out then (sorry)!

[dennis]

Its something I know a fair bit about too, unlike that expert TNP.

Yes to tape, because the disks aren't reliable enough for backup, just what I said. Its a disk cache as I mentioned in the post you are replying to.

Anyway assuming its a database, the first tier is the transaction logs which may be on tape or disk or something else. Assuming they use a proper database and not Access. ;-)

It does which is why they use *tape* and not disks.

[John Rumm]

In fact a significant numbers of organisations serious about data security do use disk as their first line of backup these days. Tucked away in a NAS with RAID its ideal - fast with direct access. Longer term backups can be archived to other media from there.

Not in the above scenario. Anyway the same argument would apply to most other backup technologies under control of a computer. You use the same mitigating techniques in either case.

I agree a single copy on a single disk is a poor solution. However multiple copies on multiple disks with fault tolerance, as a *part* of a backup scheme that involves other offline storage media, multiple locations, physical security etc is perfectly acceptable, and quite commonly used.

[Bernard Peek]

Actually disks are far more reliable than tape, but they are also much more expensive and use more power. Cost is the main factor. Disks are fine for holding a single generation of backups but if you want to hold historical data too then tape is the way to go.

Which backup strategy you choose will depend on how much data you have, how long you need to hold it and how rapidly it becomes stale. For instance Google would not use tape for their data because they have enough hardware to have multiple disk copies and in any case can rebuild their data very quickly.

It is. It is also the primary backup.

For high reliability systems the primary backup will be another database on a server elsewhere. If you have enough server capacity then you would only use tape to hold historical data for regulatory compliance.

Tape is adequate for some purposes. For the purposes that companies traditionally use backup for it's too slow for large amounts of data,

[Clive George]

Though you can also have historical data on disk with appropriate snapshotting technology.

Actually, tape is really quite fast. In terms of data transfer it can more than keep up with disks. However that doesn't help you with incrementals, so yes, primary backup still has to be to disk.

[Man at B&Q]

Semantics from Dennis again. If it looks like a backup, can be used like a backup, it's a back-up. It might not be the *final* backup or long term archive, but it's still a backup.

I suggest you look at the products from some of the companies that produce disk based backup solutions to understand. Simply google "disk based backup".

How recent is your experience?

MBQ

[Perry (News)]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:52:45 +0100, "dennis@home" waxed lyrical about:

Our Tier 1 data *never* goes onto tape, the backup is disk-based only, albeit with huge amounts of redundancy and duplicated around the TeleVault distributed data ring via their own high speed dark fibre links.

Tier 2/3 go to tape because they incorporate data, the restoration of which, is less time-critical in the event of a DR situation. The only difference between Tier 2 & 3 is the number of robotic pickers that each tier has to service any restore requests from the tape library.

Even though we have a greater volume of data on tape, our charges for Tier1/2 are considerably less than that for the disk-based storage.

Dennis you're talking bollocks, commercial scale backup is obviously something you don't have a clue about

[Adam Aglionby]

Surely tape has its own aging problems, look at problems with recovering mastertapes when CD came out, there was a Led Zeppelin CD with a scratch on it, mastered from scratched vinyl.

Can`t see why tape would be safer than a stored disc?

Cheers Adam

[Man at B&Q]

Exactly! It used to be a lot *cheaper*, however.

MBQ

[Huge]

Dennis doesn't have a clue about anything. And this particular topic is no exception. He's best killfiled.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Just tell me what the difference is between a disk with its power off, and a tape not inserted in a tape drive, apart from the crucial fact that the disk is guaranteed to be read by the same hardware that wrote it.

And offers random access where the tape does not.

That's where unprofessional idiots like Dennis who watched as someone else specified a tape backup system, 15 years ago when tape was hugely cheaper per megabyte than disk, get the idea that tape is 'better' or 'more professional'

The truth is, it was just cheaper.

WHERE you store backups is a question utterly orthogonal to WHAT MEDIA they are stored on.

Currently multiple disk strategies are both cheap, and highly practical to implement. And very unlikely to lose data. Tape is fairly expensive and bulky and requires manual intervention or robot intervention to manipulate the tapes.

Writeable optical media has many problems, done to death here, and the lifetime on FLASH technology is a little bit unkown as well.

[John Rumm]

Assuming we are talking about an internal disk then mainly that it goes up in smoke with, or is gets stolen along with the computer. However, even for home users, external hard drives are cheap enough to have at least a couple so that backups can be rotated, and one stored somewhere secure away from the computer.

Indeed, why many corporations backup onto disk as their first level of backup - its much quicker to un-delete the folder some muppet just wiped by accident without titting about mounting tapes, and spooling through looking for the right incremental.

Tape has not really kept pace with disk capacity improvements either. The price of a LTO-4 1.6TB tape is getting close to parity with a hard drive of comparable size.

Indeed.