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Re: [sheflug] Backups and Instant messaging

> 
> Hi all,
> 
> It's time for me to buy a new computer as my trusty Athlon 900 can't  
> really cope with the pictures from my digital camera. I've picked out a  
> box to buy, but I need to rethink my backup strategy now that I have  
> more than a CD's worth of photos. Plan A is to start archiving in a  
> logical manner onto DVD. Plan B being SW raid which has the advantage  
> of being easy once setup but useless against theft. What do you all  
> actually use to backup your data and does it work well?

I've used a few methods: CD-RW was nice for a while, but my CD-Writer
died a death quicker than I think it should have done (after about two 
years), so I'm slightly cautious of using CD writers for a large daily
burn + verify these days, instead I prefer to use CD/DVD for archiving.
However, hardware tech may have marched on from when I first did this
about six years ago.

Tape's been another - I've a trusty DDS1 tape drive that I used to do 
daily backups with. This was completely reliable :-) The downside with
tape is that it is slow, but the tapes are small and easily storable,
and it's still a very common technology in businesses.

However at the moment, I'm currently looking at removable hard-drives
that plug-in through USB though for the next strategy.

RAID is no compenstation for backups. Mirroring and RAID 5 is all very
well, but it doesn't prevent PEBKAC problems, such as typing "rm -f *"
in the wrong directory. Backups allow you to recover from that :-) You
may want to look into having both RAID and backups to get the best of
both worlds.

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----,   
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
   \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____

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