Robert <kerplop at sbcglobal.net> wrote: > I wasn't complaining, Bryan, simply responding. I never assumed you were complaining. I merely pointed out that a find|cpio command isn't a good command to use for benchmarking, and 8.8MBps wasn't unreasonable for it given the additional head seeks of the command and bottlenecks of the USB interface. That's all. > Actually, having moved from a DAT-2 drive DDS-2 drives are rather slow, about 0.8MBps natively -- some 15 years old -- and only hold 4GB natively anyway. You'd be better off with a DVD-R drive today. Even 1x DVD-R is 1.35MBps. I typically get 8x DVD-R for around 10MBps native. Now if you're talking a modern tape backup like LTO-3, then it's hard to beat. It's literally 150x faster than old DDS-2, and can stream at rates like a 2 or even 4 disk RAID-0 set. DLT and LTO are fairly reliable, although not the ultimate (that goes to IBM's proprietary tape technology). > to the USB-connected disk, I'm happy as a pig in sh*t > to be able to backup the whole thing unattended and have a > reasonable expectation that the resulting wad of crud is good! The problem with tape backup is that it's not used appropriately. You should never backup directly to tape. You should at least buffer to disk. But in reality, why does everything have to go to tape in the first place? That's the common issue. Stuff like daily backups really don't, and even weekly backups are not always required. At the same time, as much as fixed disk might have an advantage in near-guaranteed backups, it does present an issue when it comes to long-term retention. The disaster recovery schemes I've seen fail are the ones that were either all tape-only or all disk-only -- the combination is most effective, with disk as the immediate and primary, and tape for off-lining longer-term. Hence the new "killer app" of Virtual Tape Libraries. http://www.samag.com/documents/sam0509a/ > (I'm still gonna burn /boot, /root, /home and /etc to DVD once > a month, though.) Yes, an effective disaster recovery ensures you can bring up the system ASAP. Having a bootable DVD is critical, and typically why I make my root (/) partition 8GiB or less (so it fits on a 4.35GiB DVD-R when compressed). -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)