Biennial Crash Testing

[C. Harald Koch]

In message <B0002641836@plano.greyware.com>, "Holly Lisle" writes:
> 
> Priced them yesterday.  Ouch.  I could install an eighteen gig hard 
> drive for less that it would cost me to set up a Jaz and sufficient 
> tapes to back up my current eight gig drive.  I'm kind of thinking 
> along Guy's suggestion of adding another hard drive and backing up 
> to that.

Unfortunately, a second disk won't help if your machine takes a lightning hit,
or gets dropped on the floor (or flooded), or your office burns down, or...

Removable media has two advantages: 1) it's designed to be rugged (compared to
harddisks, anyway), and 2) you can get it physically separated from the
computer.

Especially if you keep your Linux system, it's pretty trivial to perform
automated "incremental" backups, which use less media and so are cheaper. My
home tape rotation ends up doing a complete full backup about once per month, and
smaller incrementals the rest of the time. 

My tape drive is expensive, about US$900, and DAT tapes (I use 10) are about
$10 each.  But with that I backup 4 machines with 1-2Gb of disk each, all
automatically (All I have to do is switch tapes twice a week), and the tape
drive is already two years old and still going strong.

HP Colorado drives trade off drive cost for media cost (up here the drive is
~CA$300, but the media is about CA$40.00 each for 8Gb of backup.

Have you priced using a CD Writer? At ~$300 for a drive, and $1 or less for
blank media, you can do alot of backups for cheap. Even CD-RW (re-writable
disks) are less than $3 each for ~650Mb...

-- 
C. Harald Koch     <chk@ve3tla.ampr.org>

"It takes a child to raze a village."
		-Michael T. Fry