On Tue, 16 Oct 2007, Gerry Creager wrote:
And that is a serious consideration.  We have to store in perpetuity, and it 
gets messy if we start losing data.  Been there once, had one helluvatime 
getting data restored.  We lost one disk and initiated the rebuild 
(automatically) but lost two more drives almost immediately. Unrecoverable. 
Good news: we had a distributed archive site with the data and we were, over 
time, able to repopulate the 2 or so TB we had lost.  Our database told us 
what should be recovered and a subsequent audit showed we had recovered 
everything...
Cool!
But, go with what meets your needs and fits your budget.  If you, like me, 
are in academia, sometimes meeting budget is more important than a lot of 
other considerations.
I also do tarballs, and put the backups on other machines. That's how I 
get around that possibility. Yeah, I wish I could do more. But you don't 
want to know how (not) important backups are to a lot of people.
I lost 4 hard drives and still got almost everything back as a result of 
our building (heck, our community) being a lightning rod in August. And 
Thursday looks like a potential nightmare scenario up here as well for 
severe weather. Who needs April and May to chase tornadoes when you have 
October?
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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                                  ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
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