> That's really a good question. Yes hard drives have a better money/GB > ratio, After you get over the cost of the tape drive LTO2 and better are cheaper than hard disks.
> but cheap hard drive keep your data safe only for 3 - 4 years for > sure (maybe longer) and some tapes (DLT, LTO) are specified to hold your > data for 15 - 30 Years (if the tape is not constantly in use, so for > archiving purposes). On top of that I have several other reasons why tape is better for backups. We have 10TB of data online (linux software raid 5 and 6) which represents between 1/2 and 2/3 of our data but we do not in any way consider this as a backup. What happens if the file system corrupts (I have seen this happen) and 1/2 of your data is lost? Hard drives use power and require extras (servers/cages) that make the cost of them a lot more than the price of a single drive. And they do not scale anywhere near as well as tape. And you have to replace them every 3 to 5 years or fear that you will loose your data. To avoid some of these problems you could store the drives on a shelf (in a temp / humidity controlled environment), however there is a big risk here that the drive will not spin when you install it 10 years down the line making the data on the disk very expensive to recover. John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
