I am stupid, and it has cost me

[straw]

What does that mean though? That's bullshit.

If they can keep the ship afloat at half cost, why won't 8c on the dollar work? Why not -8c? Who gives a shit?

[Tdarcos]

We run LTO-4 tapes and were planning on upgrading to LTO-5 ... I'm guessing we'll be running 4 for a bit longer. LTO-4 tapes hold 800 gig each (uncompressed) and cost $25 each. Average lifespan of a tape is 30 years ...
(LTO-5 tapes, by the way, hold 1.6 tb per tape and are even faster than the 4 series.).

Flack, I had no idea. My understanding was that the best you could do in tape backup were DC-3100 type tapes at about 60GB or something like that, and at the same price, around $25-30. I had no idea they have tapes that do 800GB at $25 a pop, that is a better solution and cheaper even than using Blu-Ray.

From what I've heard I'll bet they even have either speedloaders - jukebox-type systems that allow you to load them with 6 or 10 tapes (or more) and when a tape is full it automatically removes it and loads the next one - or supports a robotic tape loading system (they show one of these for optical disc in the Schwartzenegger movie Eraser).

With 800+ GB tapes at that low a price tape backup as either off-line or near-line storage does make a lot of sense for very large backup operations. For those not familiar, off-line means the tapes are stored, near-line means they are in a jukebox type system and it can be told to retrieve an item. Near-line storage takes a few minutes to mount a tape from the requestor, off-line you have shipped back from your storage facility.

I know about long-term requirements for government storage of documents. In Virginia, any case tried in a district court - including traffic tickets - can be appealed trial de novo to circuit court, provided you're willing to pay court costs for both trials if you lose. You can even get a jury trial, provided, again, you're willing to pay the $360 if you lose. If you have a trial in circuit court, all paperwork and exhibits must be archived for retrieval by any member of the public who wants to see it, for ten years after the case is decided. If some courthouses were very busy, imaging files and storing them on media, while putting the originals in boxes in storage facilities, would probably be cheaper than having every file in the court house, plus every document could be made available on the Internet.

Also, in both Virginia and Maryland - and I'd be surprised if other states don't offer it - you can send a copy of your will to the county clerk for safekeeping. The fee is $2 in Virginia and $5 in Maryland. So in my case I sent my will in a couple of years ago; my life expectancy is probably 20 years or less. For someone who was 25, their life expectancy is maybe 45 years. So these documents have to be kept for potentially a long time, decades, or until someone shows up with a death certificate.

I just looked it up, the drives are a bit steep, $3500 gets you an LTO-4 drive with an 8-tape autoloader, and you can go up to 16-tape autoloaders. In a business environment where data can be worth millions, or a government environment where not covering your ass can mean loss of career or worse, it makes sense.

Of course tape is slower, that's why your disk-disk-tape solution makes a lot of sense, you backup disk to disk, so you only need the extra disk space temporarily, long enough to make slower tape copies, then you keep reusing the backup disc space for making tape backups. If you have enough free space to support a week or two worth of files, then accidental deletions don't matter, since you're doing 4-hour replications, someone can get any file back from any 4-hour window over, say, the last week or two before even needing to go to the tape backups.

[Tdarcos]

(I could probably map a drive to a writable directly remote computer, and have robocopy back stuff up there, as well. Hmm. I have to find a secret place for a computer in my house. Flack, I like the idea you floated on the Gas Chamber about having a remote PC wirelessly connected in your arcade.)

Jonsey, can you get hold of a free used refrigerator or freezer that doesn't work? Something that looks ugly looking?

Now, get an old computer and either put a big hard drive in that or hook a USB external drive to it. Put a wireless USB adapter on it, and make sure it boots headless and starts up automatically. Put it inside the reefer and see that it can receive your signal.

Now you just put the refrigerator on the back porch, and, as is required by law, it's chained up to keep kids out. The cord for the surge suppressor runs out the back, and if it's an older computer, the noise it makes perfectly fits an old fridge or freezer (or it might not make noise). Sitting on the back porch outside "proves" it ain't worth nothing and a thief is in a hurry, they're not going to bother an old refrigerator.

And even if they do break in, if the computer is stuck in the ice box, they'll probably not know what it is like the condenser or converter and ignore it. Or even better if it's one of those really old gas refrigerators, sneak the computer under the coils at the top.

In that case, hide the cord rather than allowing it to show so it's not thought to be running. Have a program on it that has it reboot itself once a week, say, Sunday at 4AM so you don't have problems due to the clock overflowing.

[Flack]

Here's part of what we back up at work.

This is a rack mounted disk enclosure. This one is from EMC, but we have Dell ones too. Most of these are connected to our SAN and used for drive storage for virtual servers.

This particular one holds 15 drives. It's full, with 800 gig drives.



These racks hold 13 of those storage units. They're all filled.



Here are some new EMC racks combined with some older Dell racks. The Dell racks are also full, but with 400 gig drives.



In addition to those, we have added racks full of drives to pretty much the end of all 15 of our rows of racks. Not all of them are full, but some are.



This is essentially what we're backing up. I'm no longer responsible for the day-to-day operations of performing backups, but I used to be, and I helped designed our backup solution.

[Flack]

Couple of other notes:

Make Magazine (and several other sites) a couple of years ago documented hiding an external USB drive in a spare/old UPS. It's something a thief would be least likely to carry off -- they're almost worthless, and heavy.

The idea of sticking one in a freezer isn't a bad idea either. If you have a spare machine you're willing to dedicate to it, you could set it to Wake On Lan to save electricity.

[AArdvark]

What kind of data is worth someone physically breaking and entering into a house to steal? It's not like we are all high grade defense contractors or something.

Speaking of data, whats on all those gigs of storage anyway? Not the specifics, I don't want Flack to violate any ND stuff, but what takes up so much space? I bet the entire library of Congress could fit in ONE of those large storage thing-a-ma bobs, now I see aisles of them. That's a lotta ones and zeros.



THE
HISTORY OF THE WORLD
AARDVARK

[Flack]

What kind of data is worth someone physically breaking and entering into a house to steal? It's not like we are all high grade defense contractors or something.

I doubt most thieves want the data, they just want the computer so they can sell it or pawn it, and your data becomes an innocent victim. I'm sure there are a few cases where thieves have gone through computers in an attempt to find credit card numbers, checking information or maybe even blackmail material, but my guess is that Willie the Crack Head isn't going to those lengths. Incidently, TrueCrypt is a free (one of many) drive encryption utility that requires you to enter a password before you boot your computer. No password, no data, period.

Speaking of data, whats on all those gigs of storage anyway? Not the specifics, I don't want Flack to violate and ND stuff, but what takes up so much space? I bet the entire library of Congress could fit in ONE of those large storage thing-a-ma bobs, now I see aisles of them. That's a lotta ones and zeros.

I work here, at the largest DOT complex outside of Washington DC. I work for Aviation Safety, and all of our web servers (both public and private) are hosted here -- plus all maintenance data, pilot information, safety data, etc. We also host Academy information, medical stuff, and so forth. In fact, we host lots of servers that the folks in DC access on a daily basis.

[Tdarcos]

I bet the entire library of Congress could fit in ONE of those large storage thing-a-ma bobs, now I see aisles of them. That's a lotta ones and zeros.

Actually the History Channel had a show on the Library of Congress, and its attempts to digitize its collections. Just its collection on nitrate film takes up something like 150 long shelves in a large fire-controlled building in Virginia. They have a lot of stuff on a lot of servers at the LOC main buildings in Washington.

I don't know if Ben ever visited the LOC when he lived here in the Washington area, (I have, more than once) but even before they were doing digital collections they still used three buildings in downtown DC plus a large warehouse in Lanham, Maryland.

They're trying to digitize one item that's going to take time: the complete collection of newscasts for many years back in the 1980s, donated by CBS: 800,000 tapes. If you figure two gigabytes per hour of video, 2 hours per tape, and 4000 gigabytes now probably takes about 1 cubic foot, that alone is going to require 400 cubic feet of space, or a set of servers 40 feet long and ten feet high.

Some technical analyses of explosions, including atom smashers, can generate 10TB/sec of data. I think the estimate is "the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage."

Whenever anything is copyrighted in the U.S., at least one, and often two, copies are supposed to be sent to the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, most of which is deposited goes into the LOC collections. But there is a lot of stuff they don't get. Even so, there's a lot of data generated by a lot of things.