Software Preservation (was: SIMTEL...)

From: Eric J. Korpela <korpela_at_ssl.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri Apr 5 10:52:46 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.

I agree to this. Fortunately the storage capacity of disks is increasing
rapidly enough that I am able to keep all the files or disk images that I've
ever had with plenty of room for current software. I currently use manual
mirroring, since disks are much cheaper than a tape drive. Give it a year
(or less) and disks will be less expensive than an equivalent tape, much
less a drive. (DLT tapes are $1/GB or so. Big disks with 5 times the capacity
are $1.80/GB.) My next semi permanent backup solution will likely be a
DVD+RW even though that falls far short of the capacity I would desire.
My next step after that is a hot swappable RAID mirror system, swapping a
drive a week, with 4 drives in rotation.

> 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.

Windows can mount linux drives via Samba. Just use your favorite windows
backup program to back up to a file on the linux machine. I currently back
up two of my windows machines to the third in this manner.

Eric
Received on Fri Apr 05 2002 - 10:52:46 BST