Software Preservation (was: SIMTEL...)

From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh_at_aracnet.com>
Date: Thu Apr 4 22:41:31 2002

> I'm becoming convinced that the safest way to preserve software is to
> keep it on a live filesystem that's frequently backed up, using at
> least one type of relatively modern storage media - or at least on
> mylar tape, although that's impractical for large amounts of data (and
> impractical for me because I haven't acquired a tape punch/reader
> yet). Any thoughts on this?

I've already become convinced the only practical way to preserve it is onto
live filesystems that are regularly backed up.

The trick is finding an affordable backup system. I think I've finally
found one. My idea is to build a Linux box with EIDE RAID setup to mirror a
couple BIG EIDE disks (80+ Gigabytes). Then have everything else backup to
those disks. I've figured out good ways to backup UNIX (rsync), VMS (BACKUP
to an NFS mounted disk should work), and MacOS (Retrospect can backup via
FTP). What I've not figured out is a way to backup Windows. Ideally the
system would have enough Mirrored diskspace that it would be possible to
keep a couple full backups, and a LOT of incremental backups on it. If I
set this up, I'd like to also have some sort of tape drive hooked up to
periodically backup the data that's been backed up to the system.

                        Zane
Received on Thu Apr 04 2002 - 22:41:31 BST