RE: Somewhat OT: Large backups

["David Millard" <david@xxxxxxx>]

In my case I have a second IDE hard drive which I copy the data to once
a week or if you have a network copy the data to another drive on
another machine hard drives are cheap these days and the chances of two
drives dying at the same time is unlikely to say the least.

David
david@xxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Prior [mailto:bruno@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, 16 September 2002 6:22 p.m.
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] Somewhat OT: Large backups

Apparently some people on this list have 100s Gbs of MP3s etc. If you
are one of them, what do you use for backing up?

I am prompted to ask after a recent experience. I have about 35 - 40Gb
of MP3s on my server. I recently decided to reconfigure the server
(change the RAID partitions, upgrade the OS etc.). Although there are
tools to resize RAID partitions, they are not 100% reliable. I backed
up
the more important stuff to an old hard disk I had handy, but I didn't
have the capacity to backup the MP3s.

I have a Travan 10/20Gb tape drive, which I had used to backup the MP3s
some months ago. Unfortunately, it seemed to have died in the meantime.
In any case, that backup had taken around 2.5 days, and I didn't have
the stomach to go through that again! The old backup meant that I had
90% of the MP3s backed up, so I decided to take a risk and hope that
the
RAID resizing went without a hitch. Unfortunately, the gamble did not
pay off, so I have now hosed all the MP3s.

I'm not really worried about it, because I can either fix/replace the
tape drive or (my preferred option) re-rip the CDs with better quality
settings and better normalisation or replaygain data, but the problems
of backing up this amount of data, let alone 10 times as much, made me
think there must be a better way. What do people use?

Cheers,

Bruno Prior