SilverNodashi Posted January 30, 2019 Share Posted January 30, 2019 7 minutes ago, Johandup said: Happened to me. I lost 15 years of photos on a fancy Synergy 4 hdd server. Copy everything to a 2 hdd docking station and clone the hdd. Once bitten twice shy.... Oh, and the expensive Lacy also lost everything. Google Photos is my new best friend In all honesty, RAID isn't backup. It's just a convenience to increasing storage space with some redundancy. One still needs to backup the stuff from any storage device to another storage device, in order to have a proper backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
___ Posted January 30, 2019 Share Posted January 30, 2019 (edited) 7 minutes ago, SilverNodashi said: RAID isn't backup Ask any sysadmin. Users make mistake. They delete things. They expect you to be able to get it back. Back in the day I had a system that would make a tape backup of yesterday's files, and then make a hot copy of today's. That had the advantage of fast recovery if the user asked for a recovery on the same day. (The main reason was that the tape drive was faster than the network, and under-buffer conditions meant the tape had to stop and reposition... so local storage was required). I used to get very irritated if they came back a week later looking for files... because that meant fetching last week's tape from offsite and traversing the entire thing to restore one file. Occasionally users deleted a file on the same day they created it and also expected a backup. Users are a funny bunch... Edited January 30, 2019 by plonkster Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SilverNodashi Posted January 30, 2019 Share Posted January 30, 2019 1 hour ago, plonkster said: Ask any sysadmin. Users make mistake. They delete things. They expect you to be able to get it back. Back in the day I had a system that would make a tape backup of yesterday's files, and then make a hot copy of today's. That had the advantage of fast recovery if the user asked for a recovery on the same day. (The main reason was that the tape drive was faster than the network, and under-buffer conditions meant the tape had to stop and reposition... so local storage was required). I used to get very irritated if they came back a week later looking for files... because that meant fetching last week's tape from offsite and traversing the entire thing to restore one file. Occasionally users deleted a file on the same day they created it and also expected a backup. Users are a funny bunch... Oh, how far we have come since tape drives and ring networks Our AS400 used to backup for 8 hours straight, almost a whole weekend on month-end runs. And then you would find that Tape 5 is faulty and you have to restart the process. Fun, those days weren't Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
___ Posted January 30, 2019 Share Posted January 30, 2019 27 minutes ago, SilverNodashi said: since tape drives and ring networks I skipped the ring networks. But we did have a 10mbps link at the time, which was plenty fast, but that meant the network could transfer about 1Megabyte per second, while the brand new DLT drive (we had just upgraded from DAT3) could stream up to 6Mb per second with compression. It's a beautiful sound when a SCSI tape drive is running at full speed, and it sucks when it has to stop, backtrack, and restart repeatedly. I have no idea how big organisations do backups now. Tape is supposed to still be the cheapest... but I suspect a bunch of large USB drives is probably more practical nowadays. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
___ Posted January 30, 2019 Share Posted January 30, 2019 There was a long running gag in the BOFH stories about swapping /dev/nst0 with /dev/null, cause that makes the backups really fast. Unix humour... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.