The Logic Off Topic list

Someone said:

>>> DAT tape is currently the best solution for regular, healthy backups.



Tape backup is always a slightly risky business and is never and has never
been the most reliable form of backup, and DAT is probably the worst there
has been for SCSI tape reliability. It can be OK if you are extremely
careful and don't suffer bad luck the one time you need to rely on it, and
it has improved a lot over the years. If used for workstation backup for
maybe once a fortnight backups as a secondary backup and if the drive is
regularly cleaned when the drive's LED tells you it's time (very often
overlooked with people) the DAT is fairly good and relatively cheap. However
if cost isn't a major issue and you want tape I would use AIT, or if you can
afford it get a small RAID 5 setup and maybe back that up for extra
protection. CD is quite a reasonable backup media. The nice thing is it is
now so cheap to get a good backup routine working with CDs. I can still read
CDs I wrote 4 years ago. If the data was that critical I wouldn't go that
long without another backup anyway.

The trouble is, it is extremely easy however careful you are to find
yourself in a non recoverable situation. No-one is more careful with backups
and data integrity than me, but I've got into some sticky situations. The
most important thing of all is to back up and then imagine loosing
everything. How do you get the data back from tape or media and get back
fully working? What steps can you take to bring yourself back on line? It
may well be fine for you to reload the OS and then restore everything but
there are pitfalls in doing that, and it is time consuming.

I generally use this method:

Two hard disks, each with an image of the other, both images backed up to
servers.

Local work files backed up regularly to tape and to servers.

Servers backed up to tape.

Boot floppy containing system files and Norton recovery tools.

Servers with emergency recovery tools (Veritas Disaster Recovery)

Boot floppy to get me on to server under Dos (Win 98 DOS)

You can never over-backup! Even if I lost both local logical drives on
either workstation, I can boot under Dos to server, copy both image files to
local D, restore C from image file on D, reboot, copy image file of D to C,
restore D from image file on C. The whole process would take about one hour.
I should know I've just done it!

Warning, never select your hard drive under Wavelab as a sampler, it
destroys data on your drive completely!!!

Phil





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