Article on data rot on CD's

From: Doc Shipley <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Wed Jul 28 17:17:39 2004

Teo Zenios wrote:

> Shouldn't he have a permanent backup tape every so often in the cycle? If
> you screw up or delete a file and don't notice it quickly it will get lost
> in the rotating cycle. The major problem I see companies forgetting is
> offsite storage of backups in case of fire or something like that. Most
> companies would not survive a fire because their financial backups would be
> gone.

   Just try to convince the owner of a struggling small business that
the money poured down that drain is well-spent. Yes, he should be doing
a permanent archive at least monthly, and yes, you should rotate tapes
*out* after X reads or writes. Value of X depends on the media type,
and as far as I'm concerned, Iomega's early Travan tapes were good for
one write, and *possibly* one read.

   He was doing a permanent archive every 6 months "or so". He couldn't
be bothered to buy a new set of 6-8 tapes every month for the full
backup, and I'm sure he was having trouble finding them.

<rant>
   My company is a Tivoli reseller and service partner, and TSM is my
boss's specialty. I've heard every reason in the book for scrimping on
data protection, and they all boil down to the same thing. Non-techie
management honestly believes that if all their IT people are doing their
jobs, and all their expensive storage toys are doing _their_ jobs, and
all that shiney expensive software is doing _its_ job, tape backups are
expensive, obsolete, and useless.

   To make things much worse, there are any number of little
garage-based companies building cheap NAS/SAN solutions, and even more
storage sales folk from reputable companies, who will tell a VP exactly
that - that magnetic media is dead. Simply because they get commission
selling disk space, not tape.

   I'm all in favor of disk-based backups, mirrors, snapshots, backups
to CD-R/DVD-R, etc. They're cheap, simple, and very useful. They just
don't, can't, and never will do the whole job.
</rant>

   I'll shut up now.

        Doc
Received on Wed Jul 28 2004 - 17:17:39 BST