Just Do Backups
1. I’m too busy to do backups at home. I can rebuild the computer, right?
Sunday, December 15th, 2002
1. I’m too busy to do backups at home. I can rebuild the computer, right?
Backups are an often-neglected task, even by experienced system managers. Yes, they’re a hassle. Yes, they’re time consuming. Even so, backups are vital!
All too often, people think you can simply rebuild a system if you lose a disk. That’s true, to a point: hardware is cheap and readily replaced; you can reinstall the operating system and third-party applications easily; and while rebuilding and reinstalling system configuration files can be time consuming, even that isn’t difficult.
So why backup at all? The real danger of skipping backups lies in the uncountable (and probably invaluable) files, email, data, and programs that you’ve accumulated on your system. Rebuilding all that is simply impossible. You backup data because losing data, even a little, can make your life very unhappy. (In fact, some studies claim that the value of 100 MB of corporate data is worth $1 million. With disks at 100 GB — that represents $1 billion dollars — and growing… well, do you really need more convincing?)
So, what are your best options for backups? You can use some form of tape or other removable media, or you can use RAID or disk backups.
Removable media is the mainstay of backups in the IT world, almost since tape and disks became part of the computer. But how do you capture the contents of 100 GB disk drives? Here are some choices:
