Originally posted by: prosaic
Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
i'm surprised raid mirroring hasn't become standard now nwith todays insane drive capacities. anything that spins at 7200rpm is going to die sometime backing up all your stuff everyday is impractical for most people, and backing up everyonce in a while is too. 200gb is like 250+ cd-r's!! even dvdr sucks when it comes to this.
get a raid setup and then you can sleep soundly.
Uh, no. It's somewhat safer than a single disk. It's still not a substitute for backup. It's NOT backing up every day that's impractical, as anyone who's ever run into Mr. Murphy can tell you. It's true that, for those with budget limitations, backing up more than a few gigs of data per day to current optical media is pretty time-consuming. So what? Is all of that something you really have to back up? The backups I'm referring to as essential are actual business and personal data which is not easily replaceable, not the 20 gigs per day of MP3s or ripped DVDs that some people collect. At my office I sometimes collect several gigabytes per day of data from field operations. That data has to be sifted so that content needed for continuing live analysis of sites can be kept in online storage while other supporting data can be shunted to offline storage. This requires us to use a fairly complex backup solution for a small office, involving use of a SAN for online storage and RAID tape for offline storage as well as a remote duplicate of that system miles away. It's expensive as all get out, but not as expensive as losing everything. If the data is important, it gets backed up. Every damned day. At least.
Some people don't feel that way. Their data isn't important. They may say that it is. But it isn't. Sooner or later everyone who depends heavily upon information technology becomes a believer. Some of those people only learn after much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
- prosaic