«

Freesias <> wrote:

> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:07:02 +1200, Brian Mathews wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:50:33 +1200, thingy <>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07...1point5tb_hdd/
>>>
>>>As the articla says 1Tb might drop as a result....goodie...
>>
>> And how do you back them up..??
>
> Using a whole bunch of 50G DVDs?
>
> Using another 1T disc?
>
> Using a Raid array?
>
> Using an exact mirror offsite?
>
> Using Incremental backups?
>
> Using 300G tape drives? with several cartridges?

Or wait until 2010 and back 'em up onto Seagates new 37.5 Tb drives

"Seagate to offer 300 TB hard drive by 2010" (Thats Terabits not
terabytes, and translates to approx. 37.5 terabytes of storage on one
hard drive).
<http://www.itwire.com/content/view/8350/52/>

And then you'll be able to back up the 37.5 Tb drives onto... oh wait a
minute

--
dee

"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and
wrote their own device drivers?" <http://tinyurl.com/bgfdj>

Somewhere on teh intarweb "Mike Dee" typed:
> Freesias <> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:07:02 +1200, Brian Mathews wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:50:33 +1200, thingy <>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07...1point5tb_hdd/
>>>>
>>>> As the articla says 1Tb might drop as a result....goodie...
>>>
>>> And how do you back them up..??
>>
>> Using a whole bunch of 50G DVDs?
>>
>> Using another 1T disc?
>>
>> Using a Raid array?
>>
>> Using an exact mirror offsite?
>>
>> Using Incremental backups?
>>
>> Using 300G tape drives? with several cartridges?
>
> Or wait until 2010 and back 'em up onto Seagates new 37.5 Tb drives
>
>
> "Seagate to offer 300 TB hard drive by 2010" (Thats Terabits not
> terabytes, and translates to approx. 37.5 terabytes of storage on one
> hard drive).
> <http://www.itwire.com/content/view/8350/52/>
>
> And then you'll be able to back up the 37.5 Tb drives onto... oh wait
> a minute

Interesting. I see this part:

"This time, Seagate will use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic
recording (HAMR). These isn't much detail on exactly how this works...."

I remember reading a while back (and I note that the article is 18 months
old) that this technology will be the future of storage. I don't understand
the "not much detail" comment as I'm lead to believe that it's simply the
same as the old IBM SCSI 128MB Magneto-Optical removable disk drive that I
have on my shelf only 5+ generations ahead, using perp tech and
short-wavelength lasers. It's a technology that was left on the shelf as
being too expensive many years ago.

As I understand it the area where data is to be written has to be heated
with a laser before the magnetic flux can be re-arranged, making for
ultra-reliability as well as pin-point accuracy using the new laser tech.
That being the secret, the laser can make the area that can be written way
smaller than simple physical heads are able to now. The heads will still be
(nearly) as big as they are now but won't write to any area that isn't
heated by the laser, with that area being much smaller than the heads. I'm
not sure how reading the data will be achieved though as the heads will pick
up about 10 tracks. maybe with an alogrithm that filters out all but the
most powerful track, being the one in the centre of the heads???

Anyway, I find it intriguing. I've always liked this old magneto-optical
drive, it still works just fine despite being manufactured in 1991. Hmmm,
with 'generations' in computer tech being about 18 months I guess we're
talking 12 generations ahead, not the five I mentioned above.

<hooks it up to testbed machine for the first time in 3 years>

LOL, yeah it still works fine. My only cartridge/disk is full of mp3s and
they play fine. Hmm, must try deleting and re-writing...

Oh dear, I think maybe I shouldn't have tried copying a file to it across
the network. Either that of XP just didn't like it. It choked on the write
and now isn't recognising the disk.

Oh well, look on the bright side, I've reclaimed some shelf-space.

Cheers,
--
Shaun.

DISCLAIMER: If you find a posting or message from me
offensive, inappropriate, or disruptive, please ignore it.
If you don't know how to ignore a posting, complain to
me and I will be only too happy to demonstrate...

Mike Dee wrote:
> Freesias <> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:07:02 +1200, Brian Mathews wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:50:33 +1200, thingy
>>> <> wrote:
>>>
>>>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07...1point5tb_hdd/
>>>>
>>>> As the articla says 1Tb might drop as a result....goodie...
>>> And how do you back them up..??
>> Using a whole bunch of 50G DVDs?
>>
>> Using another 1T disc?
>>
>> Using a Raid array?
>>
>> Using an exact mirror offsite?
>>
>> Using Incremental backups?
>>
>> Using 300G tape drives? with several cartridges?
>
> Or wait until 2010 and back 'em up onto Seagates new 37.5 Tb drives
>
>
> "Seagate to offer 300 TB hard drive by 2010" (Thats Terabits not
> terabytes, and translates to approx. 37.5 terabytes of storage on one
> hard drive). <http://www.itwire.com/content/view/8350/52/>
>
> And then you'll be able to back up the 37.5 Tb drives onto... oh wait
> a minute
>
Disk to disk is the way to go. You can do it byte by byte or you can add
compression or (if there is any such in the pipeline), you could back it
up to special HDD technology arrays, similar to SANs.

What you don't do is back it up to tape.

Cheers,

Cliff

--

"I LOVE IT!!" - someone on a newsgroup, somewhere.

Freesias wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:01:57 +1200, Enkidu wrote:
>
>> What you don't do is back it up to tape.
>
> Funny that, but I know at least one enterprise that backs up all servers
> to tape.

I know (and contract to) several, at least 2 of which have recently
installed new tape libraries.

Freesias wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:01:57 +1200, Enkidu wrote:
>
>> What you don't do is back it up to tape.
>
> Funny that, but I know at least one enterprise that backs up all servers
> to tape.
>
Not for much longer. Even at the faster possible tape speed it is
getting near impossible to back up the dozens of TB that organisations
have these days.

Cheers,

Cliff

--

"I LOVE IT!!" - someone on a newsgroup, somewhere.

EMB wrote:
> Freesias wrote:
>> On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:01:57 +1200, Enkidu wrote:
>>
>>> What you don't do is back it up to tape.
>>
>> Funny that, but I know at least one enterprise that backs up all
>> servers to tape.
>
> I know (and contract to) several, at least 2 of which have recently
> installed new tape libraries.
>
I still reckon that tape is a dying technology. The amount of disk is
rocketing, the capacity of tapes is not increasing significantly. What
is more important is that the *time* to backup data is increasing
significantly. Our backups start on Friday and are never finished by
Monday. Increased backup times also increase the risk of something going
wrong during the backup, meaning that you end up with a basket of tapes
with nothing useful on them and the good backup more than a week old.

Cheers,

Cliff

--

"I LOVE IT!!" - someone on a newsgroup, somewhere.

Freesias wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:21:19 +1200, EMB wrote:
>
>> Freesias wrote:
>>> On Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:01:57 +1200, Enkidu wrote:
>>>
>>>> What you don't do is back it up to tape.
>>> Funny that, but I know at least one enterprise that backs up all
>>> servers to tape.
>> I know (and contract to) several, at least 2 of which have recently
>> installed new tape libraries.
>
> Heh heh.
>
> I'm also aware of incidents to do with backups where the amount of
> data to be backed-up was so large that the tape started overwriting
> the beginning of the backup that it had only written a short while
> earlier.
>
I know of no system that would do that. It would require the tape to be
reinserted manually with no verification of the tape. No commercial
system that I know of would allow that.
>
> I suspect this is why Cliff is wary about using tape backups (that
> and possible read errors). )
>
No, Lennier. The major problem is the backup windows stretching out to a
significant portion of the week. Even if you have multiple tape
libraries, like we do, backup windows are approaching half a week. I've
heard of one backup taking 12 days (not one of ours, fortunately).

I'm NOT wary about tape backups. I've used them for *years*. They work
fine up to a point, and we are reaching that point.

Cheers,

Cliff


--

"I LOVE IT!!" - someone on a newsgroup, somewhere.

Enkidu wrote:

>>
>> I know (and contract to) several, at least 2 of which have recently
>> installed new tape libraries.
> >
> I still reckon that tape is a dying technology. The amount of disk is
> rocketing, the capacity of tapes is not increasing significantly. What
> is more important is that the *time* to backup data is increasing
> significantly. Our backups start on Friday and are never finished by
> Monday. Increased backup times also increase the risk of something going
> wrong during the backup, meaning that you end up with a basket of tapes
> with nothing useful on them and the good backup more than a week old.

I dont get why tapes are not benifiting from all the advances in hdd
technology, they are both magnetic storage with heads - is just one is
rotational and one is linear.

Freesias wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:34:05 +1200, Enkidu wrote:
>
>> I still reckon that tape is a dying technology. The amount of disk is
>> rocketing, the capacity of tapes is not increasing significantly. What
>> is more important is that the *time* to backup data is increasing
>> significantly. Our backups start on Friday and are never finished by
>> Monday.
>
> Sounds like either:
>
> 1/ Network issue. Is the backup network a gigabit WAN with Gigabit NICs?
>
> 2/ Too much data is stored on the server. How much of the data on the
> server has been accessed in the last 6 months?
>
> 3/ Backups are being undertaken at the same time that the machine is
> being used for production related activities such as running reports or
> other stuff that is undertaken at night. Backups should be undertaken
> when the server is not required for production related tasks.
>
> 4/ Backups are not being done in an incremental manner. You only
> mentioned weekends for backups. Are daily incremental backups being done
> with full backups being done once a week?
>
> 5/ the tape drive is old and needs to be updated to a newer/faster one.
>
STFU Lennier. You don't know what you are talking about.

Cheers,

Cliff

--

"I LOVE IT!!" - someone on a newsgroup, somewhere.

Freesias wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:29:24 +1200, Enkidu wrote:
>
>> STFU Lennier. You don't know what you are talking about.
>
> Tell me.
>
> Do you consider that using two or three HDDs in a RAID aray will protect
> you against data loss and/or server down time in the event of HDD failure?
>
> If you answer "no", then why do you use RAID arrays at all?
>
> If you answer "yes" then you agree with me.
>
STFU Lennier. You don't know what you are talking about.

I apologise for repeating myself, but first time didn't get through.

Cheers,

Cliff

--

"I LOVE IT!!" - someone on a newsgroup, somewhere.