On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 6:36 PM, Leslie Rhorer <lrhorer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Sir - Whereas Neil, et al, profess that RAID is NOT equal to BACKUP - >> Most of us know that tape backup is VERY costly, in several ways, in our > > No one used the word "tape". Tapes have not been a practical means > of backups for many systems for quite some years. Today, for most large > systems, the most practical backup solution is hard drive based. Since the > OP already has a RAID10 system he has enough or nearly enough drives for a > hard drive based backup. Since he is already talking about a remote NAS > system, his additional costs can be as low as $0, or at most the cost two or > three additional drives. I think that may be a point of contention. Places where I've worked, primary data stores, on the order of hundreds of terabytes have been backed up to tape, and were part of an offsite rotation. Does that mean everyone can? Maybe not. But if people can afford to purchase multi-million dollar SAN and NAS systems, they can certainly afford a tape library and some LTO tapes. Is it expensive? Certainly. But often disk-based backups can provide a false sense of economy--disks use power, take up rack space, generate heat--these are all things people should consider when building out a data center. But, of course, he's not building out a data center, and he's probably not going to buy LTO4 drives either. Did we use disk-based backups? Certainly, and often as a part of a snapshot system where you could go "yesterday" and pick up data. But they were shipped to tape too. But, like I said, data is only important if it's important, and for some organizations, it's VERY important :) cc -- Chris Chen <muffaleta@xxxxxxxxx> "The fact that yours is better than anyone else's is not a guarantee that it's any good." -- Seen on a wall -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
