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How do you backup your data at home?
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-- Fran Lebowitz
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday August 28 2015, @05:13PM
I have a tape backup library. Why change tapes when I can rotate them via a robot? I suppose I have to change them occasionally. Backing up VMs was never so easy, and tapes never crash.
Anything important gets placed externally via a secret handhake--with both TCP and physically, since I haven't yet underestimated the bandwidth of a car full of backup tapes. Latency can be poor, though... especially if I am too lazy to make the trip. That physical device may be a tape or a disk drive.
I have tapes that have outlived drives; I probably have tapes that will outlive me. I also have drives that do not work in any of the PCs I presently own; not without having to get an adapter of some kind. I once relied on CDs and DVDs;they are now not only too small, but some of them don't even read any more or they have visible flakes of material that seemingly have disappeared. Write once and read never after long term temperature controlled storage. Vinyl records proved to be a more reliable medium.
Nothing of mine (intentionally) goes to those commercial providers, since it seems unreasonable to mount a series of 150gb VM from them after copying it up at 10mb and trying to continuously sync the differences. A home user can only do so much before having to reason that they aren't giving out terabytes of space for cheap because they want me to encrypt 7zipped files with it over a 10mb connection. The TCP handshake I mentioned goes over a tunnel to hardware I manage. I guess I pay for that convenience since that isn't free.
Then again, I am the type that would run iscsi over dialup because I can, not because it is a good idea. I do not see cloud storage (for my needs) as a good idea, and am not doing it because so many others with differing best interests in mind presume that they can make me without permission. That trust was lost when it was assumed they had it.
Tapes are cheap, reusable, and work great. People are not pleased with the inconveniences tape may bring, but I guess conveniences got them the types of privacy issues we have today, with Windows 8 and 10 presuming you want to save in the cloud over DSL instead of on your local storage at much faster speeds. That isn't backup-- that's the default!!
In any event, I at least resist even if it isn't entirely (or very) effective. It gives me something to complain about, and having passion for something is good, right?
Some day my tape reader will break and I'll cry, but I'll just go on ebay and get another. I already have a few stand alone drives I got for cheap in preparation for that eventual inevitability. If they can read tapes from the Apollo program, I am sure someone will have an tape drive that works for what I have.