Best HD make for PC

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Important only to me. I don't store things like PINs etc anywhere - apart from in my head.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Nothing I have the only copy of.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Any CRT is more likely to catch fire than an LCD, IMHO.

But in any case I have two Acorns in different parts of the house and both have the important (to me) files on them - and in both on two HDs.

[Adam Aglionby]

Cripes , remember Emitape, think it had oxide shedding problems from new ;-)

Its stories of tape baking and things that make me wonder

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

Digital obsolescence is a gotcha as well, BBC Domesday Book...

data density is still not great on film, but it does have a track record, non of the other optical media seem stable enough yet ?

Cheers Adam

=A0 London SW

[Bernard Peek]

No Dennis. He's not doing anything special and this is the way your bank routinely handles business-critical data.

[The Natural Philosopher]

film also degrades. Best to date is speia toned PRINTS. but even those don't last forever.

The real answer to long term storage is simply to take old media..hard disks, and as they become unplayable copy the data onto the next one, and just keep copying it forever onto the latest media there is.

As far as whether or not the file format will be readable..well at least that's not a rosetta stone class problem.

I'm actually building an archive of model aircraft plans. On three disks on two machines at two different locations plus the original paper, plus an online site. In another continent. I guess we might not survive nuclear war, but it seems pretty safe to me.

A lot got lost 2 years ago when a 'backup disk' crashed and died, and foolishly the unit was sent back to teh suppliers..who wiped it. so we took matters into our own hands when we decided to re-scan them all slowly.

No tapes are involved. The cost of a tape drive considerably exceeds the opportunity costs of the machines and extra disks.

[dennis]

No they do not, they write it to tape including the transaction logs every day. Show me one major bank where they don't write it to tape. Even televault state that they write it to tape if you bother to read televault's documentation.

You can believe what you like I have posted links to prove what I say, everyone else has just posted hearsay and i am not going to argue with that.

QED.

[Huge]

Well, I didn't think it was otherwise. I don't know about you, but I have a lot of stuff on my computer that I would be loathe to lose, so I have an off-site backup.

[Perry (News)]

On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:37:21 +0100, "dennis@home" waxed lyrical about:

FFS Dennis, you look at a PDF describing their service in the most general terms and think you know it all.. the PDF you linked to is a simplified description of their services and, even then, nowhere does it say that all data goes to tape.

Tier 1 is purely disk based and is much more expensive (and I have the invoices to prove it). Their tape-based backup was their original offering, the disk-based solution has only been available for a few years.

Look here for a slightly better, though still not exhaustive, description of the service

they mention 'Once the data is at the off site location it is migrated from the initial disk storage to the selected storage pool at the primary site.' at the bottom of the second paragraph, it means that data is backed up from your servers to their backup cache area, then migrated from the backup cache to the relevant 'storage pool' for that tier - the storage pools are disk-based for Tier1, tape for Tier2/3.

They cache all backup data to disk first for efficiency and operational reasons. The disk-based backup cache area is of much lower capacity than the actual data storage pools as it is only a transient area used to take/verify the backup data from the customer's site before it's moved to the main disk or tape-based storage pool.

FWIW, we've been using Guardian for DR and TeleVault for backups for about 8 years now, spending what seems like the GDP of a small African country in the process, so I think I'm in a position to have a slightly better understanding of how the system works than you do

As you seem intent on arguing from a position of ignorance, and I feel that your postings are verging on the troll-like, I think it's time you went in the killfile...

Bye...

[Man at B&Q]

[e-mail]...

Quite a clear question but, as always, when challenged you clam up.

MBQ

[dennis]

messagenews: [e-mail]...

What's clear about it? Its a completely open ended question which I have no intention of investing time in answering. You want to know the specifics for a particular scenario and you may get an answer but I am not going to educate you in something that would take weeks. If you want to know invest the time yourself.

[D.M.Chapman]

Routine restores, I bet they do - ideally you should never go to tape.

We have a series of levels, zfs snaps (disk based) for first level, copied to second site (still disk). Then to a VTL (yep, disk) that is on a couple of racks of HDS raid 6 arrays (disks die - doesn't matter).

yes, stuff is then taken to tape and shifted to firesafes. That's a last resort DR backup though - restoring to those isn't seriously an option most of the time (except in a true disaster which, fingers crossed, we haven't had). Archival stuff is different, but for backups, it's disk to be useful. A backup from tape is usually too out of date to be all that useful - we can't afford to lose a days work on core systems.

Just about every restore that happens is from disk.

Who said only? If I delete something at 5pm in the afternoon it's the only way we can restore it - it won't hit tape for a few days.

I think we are talking different levels of "disk" here... sure, a single spindle isn't great. Enterprise level backup is far from that - and has been for years.

Darren

[Jules Richardson]

although it was when put into storage two years ago) :-)

I've seen some LVROM discs decay from the outside in, presumably due to some kind of failure where the disc surfaces meet at the rim (thankfully mine are still OK).

That hold-up in preserving the data from them was really down to copyright issues, not because of any problem with the technology...

cheers

Jules

[Jules Richardson]

I'd agree, but wouldn't say "latest there is", because the latest tech hasn't had time to build up a track record for reliability (e.g. what I said elsehwere in the thread about home-burned CDs and DVDs sometimes having readability problems on other drives).

Broadly-speaking, hard disks seem a good bet right now - but that still doesn't mean I'll go out and buy the latest, largest drive I can find on the shelf, because I don't know if it'll prove reliable where I to park it on a shelf and come back to it in a year or two.

Some of us spent quite a bit of thinking time a few years ago trying to define an archive format that was self-documenting, in that a human could look at the file's contents and find a human-readable section that would describe how the real data was put together. It seemed like a good idea at the time - but there were various problems to do with lauguages and character encodings for the "human readable" bit that knocked the idea on its head.

(I still think it might be a valid concept - but it still doesn't provide protection for any significant period of time, and at the end of the day 'refreshing' file formats to whatever's common at any given time is really just as valid as 'refreshing' raw data onto the best media of the day)

So long as the archive format is reasonably obvious, the encoding used makes sense to whoever finds it at a later date, some data can be extracted even if the archive is damaged etc.

cheers

Jules

[Adam Aglionby]

Copyright has prevented them ever reappearing but it was technical issyues that meant they were locked to their playing system and as they died, early LV players used HeNe lasers, the data became less accessible

tree is as good as it ever was ;-)

Cheers Adam

[D.M.Chapman]

and your tape backups of the system that are images of the data from a SAN that has been corrupting it's data are fine?

Darren

[The Natural Philosopher]

A large enough thermonuclear explosion will invalidate any backup policy.

For the rest, there is statistical analysis and cost benefit analysis.

Big words that dennis doesn't understand.

Over my time in IT, the 'optimal' solution has varied. Tapes at one time were, despite the manual aspect, the best solution.

When I looked at them in the light of modern technology, they were not.

What dennis cant grasp, because he is fundamentally thick, but wont accept it, is that

'in 1993, the best strategy was tape, in the context of BT' does not mean 'tape is always best, for everyone, for all time, in every context'

[dennis]

That depends on your backup routine doesn't it?

[chris French]

In message , The Natural Philosopher writes

I'm not convinced that Dennis doesn't just argue to be contrary, and for the sake of it. Whatever the topic.

If so he is rather successful at it. I'm just bemused why so many people feel it worth their time to continue arguments with him.

[dennis]

Of course it won't. It might lower its value to zero but there is not a reason to lose the data.

Well when you come out with cr@p like that who is the thick one? PS The largest bomb available only has a blast range of about 10 miles and the EMP will have no effect on a tape in a fire safe. It might well take out all the drives in a disk system though.

Its very funny that there is a group of people here that will make ever more complex systems just to claim disks are better than tape when the whole thing was based on one person doing backups of his home machine and me saying that disks are not a good solution. Now we have SANs, WANs, SANs, and all other stuff that he will never be able to use and it still has problems to solve. And nobody has actually answered his original question and disks are still not a good solution for him.