[Info-vax] One wonders why people bet their companies on Microsoft based

[William Webb]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:55 PM, ChrisQ <meru at devnull.com> wrote:
> Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>
>>
>> Far too many people think of RAID as a substitute for backups!  It is not.
>>  It usually protects against a failure of a single disk.  It does so very
>> well as long as you notice when one member of the set has failed and replace
>> it promptly.  It provides no protection against deleting or overwriting the
>> wrong file!
>>
>> Backup n. What you should have made yesterday!
>
> Agreed and there's more than one way to skin the cat. If you have a lot of
> data to backup, tape just takes too long and disk based backup is far more
> effective. The approach here is the have a pair of raid 5 groups mirrored by
> rsync daily, which are themselves mirrored to another machine  in a
> different location once a week, again using rsync across the network. It's
> essentially free, just works, is faster than tape and can be automated via
> scripts...
>
> Regards,
>
> Chris
>
>
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I got to visit a datacenter in Dallas where one of our affiliates had
some ES40s located.

About half of this datacenter (and I'm guessing it was several hundred
thousand square feet) was one of Yahoo's server farms, and I got to
peek through the windowed part of a door at it.

Racks and racks and racks of small systems.

I was told that they continuously backed up to tape, and they had big
metal boxes on cargo pallets that they put the tapes into.   And they
shipped about three pallets worth of tapes offsite daily.

(Insert station wagon/magtapes joke here).

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