That depends entirely upon the tape drive. Some drives could be 10x slower than disk.
SCSI tapes are likely to be faster than other methods, but just getting any old tape drive does not equate to "faster".
PoP
Sorry, but they're not. *Old* tape drives may be slower than modern disks, but current tape drives are considerably faster than current disks, comparing sustained transfer rates for both.
Disk manufacturers use RAM buffering (cacheing) to boost perceived performance, but sustained transfers, such as backups and restores, really test disk data channels fully. In sustained transfers, caches have almost no effect on overall performance.
Regards,
Simonm.
In article , PoP writes
I don't remember saying that it did. See my other post regarding disk v. tape performance.
Regards,
Simonm.
Yet another opinion here ;-) Me, I use a "real" backup programme, Dantz's Retrospect
- tape, CD-R or -RW, DVD-R/RW; and on other machines (both as normal network shares, and through the pricier Retrospect client-server arrangments). Its built-in system-recovery stuff has worked for me on the one occasion it really needed to; and single-file restores are easy too.
Storage is cheap enough these days (and uk.d-i-y types are almost bound to have an older PC up in the loft they couldn't bear to throw away!) that working hard on compression and proprietary formats is probably an error. (Accepting that Retrospect is a proprietary format, mind, though it does have a handy "duplicate" subfunction; though something like FileSync will do that and cost less). You have to think through what's going to be most of a pain for you to reconstruct. If you have a pretty standard OS install with just a few add-on apps, the claim that backing up your individually created data is Enough is relatively plausible: it makes retrieving accidentally deleted precious stuff easy enough, and leaves you facing an OS+apps reinstall in the worst case. If you've rather a lot of apps, patches, updated drivers, firewall customisations, etc. etc. applied to your OS, and you value your time and sanity, backing up the whole shebang and TESTING THE EMERGENCY RESTORE PROCEDURE WHEN YOU'RE NOT STRESSED OUT is a Good Idea.
Whichever solution you go for, it'll be a lot easier if you've created a number of distinct partitions for different kinds of Stuff than if it's all lumped under "C:\". F'r instance, on the Winblows systems I run I have an OS partition (W: or X:), a Data partition (D:) with a subdirectory for my hand-created most-precious data and one for my apps, a "Fragephera" partition on F: for temporary files, web cache, and all that junk, a swap partition (Swapee on E:), and one or two "big" partitions for pictures and music. Oh, for the NT-based systems there's a small FAT partition which holds BOOT.INI, NTDETECT, and that other initial-boot junk, and some system recovery tools. Having this stuff in these different containers makes it easier to create backup strategies for different needs, and different file systems for different tasks (e.g.: the app and OS partitions are NTFS, so that any malicious software running under my "normal, unprivileged" user wouldn't be able to infect most of my binaries; the audio/picture partitions are tuned to storing a small number of large files (big clusters), while Fragephera is done with tiny clusters).
Hope that helps some (and look - no advertising, even peripherally, well until this point anyway, for the excellent DDS and AIT tape drives made at the HP site in Bristol ;-) - Stefek
Given that you need to back up only a few GB (same as me) this is what I do:
1) Weekly backup of the whole lot to a tape. TR-4 Travan tape drive in my case, 8GB compressed, 4GB uncompressed (i.e. 4GB no matter what). I bought a spare drive in case nasty things happen all at the same time...cheap enough as a used, but tested (!) drive. I picked up brand new tapes for under a fiver each on eBay. I start these backups every Friday night when I go to bed, and they take about 3 hours. 2) Daily differential backup to hard disk on another machine. Differential, as in anything that's changed or added that isn't on the tape already. An incremental (as in 'all files not so far backed up anywhere' takes less space but is more of a pain for a complete restore. These differentials get backed up to the tape every week too, since they get overwritten (on the disk) on a weekly basis (one backup for each day). These are done automatically in the middle of the night. 3) There is a tape cycle. For the sake of simplicity, let's say there are six tapes. Weekly, I use tape 0 in first week, 1 in second week, then tape 2, then 3. Then 0,1,2,4, then 0,1,2,5, then 0,1,2,6. Then start again. Add more tapes if you want. 4) When I finally use tape 6, I also do a backup to CD-R and squirrel that away for ever. In fact, I do two copies and take one to work. Intermediate tapes get taken too. 5) The above cycle means that the tapes contain enough to return me to the state I was in at any time over the past month. Say a file is corrupted; I select the tape written the week before the corruption occurred (of course, I won't necessarily KNOW when, but that's life). Either the file will be on that weekly backup tape, or it changed in the following week, in which case it's in the differential backup file for the appropriate day, on the next tape. For the previous three months, I have a monthly tape that probably has the file. 6) If I don't notice a file has gone for four months, I may still have a copy on the CD-R. Otherwise, too bad. It's always a trade-off with backups.
Even if they were (and they're not)....how do you get this extra speed. After all, you're copying from...er....a disk!
scumbag running off
Yes, but your original post appeared to throw that in as an afterthought...
Often.
Hi
Probably a little more esoteric than most home installs but...
Linux server running Samba and acting as roaming profile store.
Couple of machines using the roaming profiles. Allows us to move from machine to machine and see the same shortcuts, etc. I also use disk caddies, so have 3 'personalities' for my main machine depending on whether I'm using Win95, Win98, various development tools, etc.
These machines effectively hold OS and local apps only. I Ghost these after app install but before any usage, so when they go a bit wierd I just resplat the primary disk with the Ghost image.
Samba 'home' drive mapped so all Word, etc. files are stored on Linux box.
Shell scripts every night to gzip all files changed in last 7 days on home drives to daily backup file. Scripts also housekeep old backup files to bit bucket (30 day retention IIRC). 7 days so if the machine is off for a couple of nights things still get picked up somethime.
Periodic backup of gzip files to CD-ROM. Occasional full backup too. Not as often as I should!
HTH IanC
What is the price a storage capacity of a stand alone with USB cxn DVD writer?
The Sony DRX-510UL External DVD/-RW drive comes in at about £250 inc vat. Requires either firewire or USB 2.0 for connecting to your pc. 32x CD read,
24x CD write, 16x CD rewrite, 12x DVD read, 4x DVD write, 2x DVD-RW rewrite, 4x DVD+RW rewrite. Capacity is 4.7Gb.hth Clive
In message , David writes
DVD writer?
Or ... a removable Hard disk
In message , Clive Summerfield writes
If the OP's so concerned about backing up, one thing which I've just though of is the problem of viruses, which you often don't know you have until it's too late. Thus your last back up might be infected, wheras if you have e.g. discrete weekly backups, the chances of you being able to restore an uninfected version are better.
TBH, you only really want to back up your data files, and re-install programs (which you can also copy onto a DVD)
In message , PoP writes
I haven't seen anything less than a 40Gig drive for sale for a while now.
>"Bob Eager" wrote in news:176uZD2KcidF-pn2- snipped-for-privacy@rikki.tavi.co.uk:
Which you are only reading - not writing. It can be considerably faster to read than write a disk as there is no read-after-write type of checking to be done. There is also no need to go off and update the FAT/MFT or whatever.
I suggest that it is possible for a disk to be faster than a tape at reading but slower when writing.
Rod
Anyone who runs a PC these days would be silly to not have up to date AV software running at all times.
The vast majority of people aren't that organised, nor should they be in reality. Reason being that worst case you can vapourise your PCs hard disk and re-install everything from scratch.
PoP
I have 5 PCs running here in different parts of the house. Some of those are on independent UPS's - so surges aren't likely to ruin my day.
I routinely copy the backup sets across the network so that the backups are on multiple independent drives in different PCs.
Important data is backed off to CDRW.
PoP
I omitted to say that - but it is possible a 2nd hard drive could be acquired from ebay or similar.
PoP
Possible, perhaps...but not when doing a real backup. Tapes stream, disks don't - unless there is one large contiguous file on the disk. A real mix of files will have seek and rotational latency delays as differnt files are accessed.
As a point of interest have you ever tried to restore from PowerQuest? I wondered what your experience was?
I have PowerQuest here, also Norton Ghost, and more recently Acronis TrueImage. I've used them all so can make comparisons.
I liked PowerQuests user interface which was quite neat. However I once had to try and restore from the PowerQuest backups (which were on CD). Backup was great - restore was absolute pants.
I had 5 CDs as I recall. The restore operation began with asking me to insert disk 1, then disk 5, then back to disk 1 - or something like that. And then proceeded to write back to hard disk at a ridiculously low rate of transfer that meant I'd still have been restoring this time next Christmas. Quite unbelievable.
Norton Ghost is brilliant by comparison. Shoddy user interface but if you drive it from the command line it is great. Restores dumps at a good speed - same for TrueImage.
PowerQuest have just been bought by Symantec by the way - so Symantec now own the rights to Norton Ghost and PowerQuest DriveImage:
Same here - except its 7 or 8 PCs...and multiple UPS systems!
Yep. That's what my overnight ones do.
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