Re: Backup hard drive

[gregt@porsche.visix.com (Greg Thompson)]

>"Glenn" == Glenn Koproske <flash@pro-applejacks.cts.com> writes:

  Glenn> lee@pro-novapple.clark.net (Lee Raesly) writes:
>And if you get a Hard Drive, it's ONLY advatage in a business
>situation is Speed, NOT Storage. NEVER BACK UP A HARD DRIVE!!!!

  Huh?  Why not back up, and why isn't storage an advantage?

>If your HD crashes, you must either get it repaired, or buy a new one,
>before you can restore your backup.

  Repairing hard drives isn't worth the money.  It's much more cost
effective to buy a new one, and restore your backup onto it.

  Glenn> Naaaah.  Speed is important, but hard drives are the sole
  Glenn> storage media in businesses.  Floppies are still unreliable
  Glenn> and are only useful for sneakernet.

  Agreed.

  Glenn> As for backing up, it is very seldom if ever that a hard
  Glenn> drive crashes.

  I don't know what universe you've been living in, but I'm on my
third drive now on my GS.  The first, a 20 meg junker, died when the
brakes started rubbing, which slowed the disk down enough for it to
think that the motor was going bad, so it would power down.  Nice.
The second, an 80 meg Seagate, had the lubricant break down, so it had
massive sticktion problems.  Towards the end, it started losing data
as well as being a big pain in the ass to get spinning.  My third and
current drive, a 200 meg Conner, is still tickin', but I wouldn't be
suprised if it started having problems in a year or two.

  Glenn> Where our tape backups come into play on a regular basis is
  Glenn> either when a user deletes something and needs it back, or if
  Glenn> they have to set things back a week or a month or a quarter
  Glenn> and re-run a business process to generate new numbers.  A
  Glenn> tape is the slickest way to do this.

  I agree that tapes are good for that, but drives go down all the
time.  If you think hard drives crash so seldomly, then I wish you
luck.  We had three or four drives crash in a 2 day period here at
work a month or two ago.  That was fun.  Make backups.  Drives DO die.


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