On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com> wrote: >> > If this is only a 1-2 year temporary solution and the backups will be discarded once a permanent solution is obtained then I'm sure it will be OK. > > If your thinking of building a long-term backup solution this way then your building your castles on a foundation of sand. As backup sets grow and hardware/software ages you may find yourself in a technological dead-end unable to migrate the data off and unable to continue going forward. On the other hand, if you have a predictable churn of high performance production boxes being replaced every few years, tossing a few new big cheap drives into a still nice but retired server and starting over is a very attractive option. You don't need to migrate anything - just keep the old box around until the replacement has the history you need to keep. > Buy a Data Domain, Exagrid or Falconstor backup storage appliance with builtin compression/de-duplication that is fully supported and has a viable upgrade path. Use a good centralized backup platform such as netbackup, networker, etc. The investment made in backup is an investment in the business' future. There's a place for those, but probably not for someone who doesn't even want to buy new drives. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com