[mythtv-users] Lost my OS hard drive (also ran)

Travis Tabbal travis at tabbal.net
Tue Sep 15 22:30:43 UTC 2009


On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:

>
> I've never had a DLT tape get eaten or otherwise fail.
>
>
If only mere mortals could afford DLT tapes, let alone the drives. When the
backup tapes cost more than the HDDs holding the data, it just doesn't make
sense to use tape.


>
> Drive-to-drive is certainly fast, but not all that reliable, unless you use
> multiple drives.
>

It's about as reliable as any tape I've ever used, short of the high end
"enterprise" tape systems. Combine HDDs with ZFS or other checksum based
error correction (par2?) and you can get a decent backup system with them.
And it's the BACKUP, so you don't need all that many copies of it. Most of
my data loss over the years hasn't been from hardware failures, it's been
from screwups with "rm" and friends. I use Snapshots to avoid that problem
now, so hardware is the next issue. RAID helps with that. It's not a
substitute, stuff I can't lose is backed up with many copies. However, the
volume of data that really meets that description is pretty small. <100G for
me. Easy to rsync to multiple machines in the house and I'm planning an
offsite backup of some kind as well. Probably on a couple HDDs. I'll grab
them and do a ZFS scrub on them once in a while to check for bit-rot.

I don't really back up my Myth video archive. RAID handles that, and if I
lose it, it will suck, but it can be recovered from the original DVDs and
such. I might start using some 2TB drives as backup disks. I'm still
debating that. An E-SATA HDD dock sure makes that a whole lot easier to deal
with.

It would sure be nice to have a cheaper way to backup our data, but no
company seems to think it's a worthwhile market. And judging by the number
of people I know that have accidentally deleted the only copy of a file they
can't replace, that would fit on a CD-R, they are probably right. Even at a
decent price point, would people actually buy them? If people won't spend
the time to burn a simple CD backup, would they spend the money and time on
a tape based system? I doubt it. I think the best bet for users is something
like Apple's Time Capsule. A simple, automated, background process that
copies the data to another disk on the network. Again, not so much for video
libraries, but for the digital photos and such, it's great stuff. And once
you take the pretty UI away, Time Machine works with rsync and hardlinks
under the hood, just like rsnapshot, which is what I've been using to get
the job done.
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