[GTALUG] Advice -- Building Debian 8 PC To Replace Win XP PC;

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 01:51:33PM -0400, Steve Petrie, P.Eng. via talk wrote:
> "Easy, fast, reliable" sounds pretty tempting to me.
> 
> Thanks to advice from GTALUG, I'm prettly close to abandoning my
> nostalgic love for SCSI tape backup :)
> 
> If I can be comfortable with portable hard drive resistance to
> mechanical shock ... And if a 2.5" portable drive will fit in my very
> small off-site storage box ...
> 
> I would need two portable backup hard drives (one on-site and one
> off-site). I estimate a cost of $375 for a SCSI controller card together
> with a (used) VXA tape drive. Plus the cost of tape cartridges, of
> course. So I'll have to see what 2 x 2.5" portable HDDs will cost. 1 TB
> capacity drives should be sufficient.

I thought all modern tape drives were SAS these days.

Hmm, VXA, that used to be exabyte, which was 8mm helical scan.  After
dealing with DDS I would never trust helical scan for my data.  No way.
Wears out tapes so fast and so unreliable.  Well DDS was, although I
guess those were 4mm tapes.  It looks like VXA is better than that,
but I still see it listed as "The most reliable helical scan", not
"the most reliable tape format".

It's too bad LTO is rather expensive to buy a drive for.

Personally I do backups with rsnapshot accross the internet to my parents
place, and their system does it to mine.  Since the changes are not very
big, the rsync doesn't need much bandwidth.

My experience with USB drives is that 3.5" drives tend to fail when
transported, while 2.5" drives are much more durable, but slower and of
course smaller in capacity.

Another annoyance with tape is that should your place burn down, you
now have to locate another tape drive of the right type to read your
backup again.  That can be a hassle depending on how popular the model is.
A USB drive is certainly a lot simpler that way being entirely self
contained.

-- 
Len Sorensen