> > The other hard drive. I'm currently putting together a new 
> system, and
> > the storage is going to be 4 75GB ATA drives in a RAID 0+1
> > configuration. 
> 
> RAID/Mirroring is fine, but no solution to the "ooops!" problem of,
for
> example, accidentally deleting a file; or an non-repeatable update in
> place batch job screws up your database.  It's looking like backups to
> disk, NAS, or SAN is starting to look better for short term backup
> storage.

Error recovery is certainly an issue, but I generally separate those
requirements from hardware failure recovery. For TurboIMAGE, user
logging has always seemed to me to be one of the easiest and cheapest
methods for short-term recovery from user or programmer mistakes.

WRT the standard exhortation to store backups off-site: putting the
mirror drives in removable carriers allows you to yank them out and take
them to the vault as needed.

> Still, disk isn't quite ready for long-term (archive) storage just
yet,
> although it's getting close (can you afford to have enough removable
> drives for monthly/quarterly/annual archives?  How many sets do you
> need?)

Depends on the system, obviously. But backing up the databases for
archival purposes is not usually the same magnitude problem as backing
up an entire system for safety (though I have to wonder about people
like Walgreen's, with their terabyte-size databases--what do they use
for backup?). Backing up a few hundred megabytes of data four times a
year is a completely different animal than backing up the entire machine
every night.

I'm even considering using hard drives for interchange. Jaz drives are
up to 2GB now, but a 2GB Jaz drive and a half-dozen 2GB disks costs more
than a half-dozen 40GB ATA drives plus removable-drive carrier/holder
setups for a dozen machines. Though I'm not sure carrying hard drives
around in a briefcase will do much for their reliability. Another option
is CD-RW, though the capacity is a bit small. But rewriteable DVD isn't
that far away. Lots of options.

Hard drives as semi-disposable commodity items; who'da thunk it?

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