[OpenIndiana-discuss] Tape backup

[DormitionSkete@hotmail.com]

We have several buildings in our monastery that are all connected with fiber.  I have a backup server in one of the buildings that is geographically separated enough from the building that houses our server room that it is highly unlikely that any fire or natural disaster that we're ever likely to encounter here in the mountains would ever take out both buildings.

We still do tape backups, but this is our primary backup system.

It's still on the same LAN, so theoretically, it's still vulnerable to attack that way; but all of the shares are hidden, and if I really wanted to, I could limit access to it through only the servers that back their data up to it.

It's a lot handier to restore files from it than it is from tape.

It's not a good solution for long term storage, but while you are revising your backup routine, you might want to consider something like this if you are not already doing it.  

Oh, and as long as you have old tapes, don't forget to hold onto a drive for them that you can install in a system if you ever need to restore data from them.  I knew someone who got bit by that once.  Ouch!

Finally, we had an accounting manager in an organization I once worked for that was embezzling large amounts of money.  He caught on to the fact that they were on to him.  Since he knew where the backup tapes were, and had access to them, they conveniently disappeared.  It made prosecuting him significantly more difficult.  They were still able to get him for taking over $300,000 (back in the 1990's), but they never were able to determine just how much he had taken.  It was most assuredly *much* more than that.  And he was such a "nice" guy, too...

And don't forget to safeguard important software install disks and licenses.

HTH


On Mar 15, 2013, at 3:16 PM, Achim Wolpers wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I considere to backup my data on a tape drive off my OI box. Now I face a couple of questions:
> 
> 1. Which drive is recommended to work with OI? I'd like to use 800GB tapes
> 2. Since I plan to use the tapes for long time backup, is the a way to store the data with some kind of redundancy (like  RAID-Z), so that when parts of the tape might get corrupted over time, the data can still be restored?
> 
> Thanks,
> Achim
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