[Info-vax] ODS-5 data/file recovery

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-02-17 01:28:00 +0000, David Froble said:

> MG wrote:
> 
>> Do you have terabytes to back up?  Because that would be one of the
>> issues I'd have to overcome.
> 
> No, and that makes it much easier.  Most of my disks are rather old, 1 
> GB, 2 GB and such, and not very full.  I've also got some 36 GB disks 
> on my Alpha, and I use these strictly for image save sets of the 
> smaller disks.
> 
> Frankly, while it's a bit more complex, backing up just what has 
> changed works rather well.  With terabytes of storage, I've got to 
> believe that 99% of it does NOT change on a daily basis.  So it still 
> should be a managable thing.

Storage prices are headed back downward, again.  Four-terabyte 6 Gbps 
SATA disks are US$210 on Amazon.

With smaller SCSI storage configurations, I've rolled out new 146 GB 
SCSI drives into some older configurations; those were US$40 each, when 
reusing some "spare" parts.

When it comes to making data backups, it's a case of capturing the data 
churn while avoiding copying out data that's easily recoverable from 
distro, as David states.  BACKUP does this incremental stuff fairly 
well, though (as I've groused before) everybody gets to roll their own 
DCL procedures.

So find your static data.  Add some disks for target storage.  Roll 
your own DCL incremental BACKUPs.

I'm not so sure tapes make all that much sense for small shops and 
hobbyists, either.  Yeah, tapes do work.  Decent choices for long-term 
and off-site, too.  Tape drives (with decent capacity), libraries 
(again, with decent capacities), and tape media are (fairly) expensive, 
and (without a library or loader) require some manual effort.  For 
transient and local backups and particularly hobbyist stuff, disks are 
a cheap^Winexpensive choice.

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