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Simon Avery wrote: > CD's are *not* a reliable backup > medium. Sadly this applies to both generic and branded CD's in my > experience. :( (I think Robin was using this CDR as a transport medium rather than a long term backup but ne'er mind - next time, Robin, use FTP! :-) ) What is a reliable backup medium? Seriously, what kind of storage medium is going to last for years into the future *and* still be supported by the operating systems of the time. Hard disc space at home is cheap. A decent solution is to recycle an old PC (386/486/Pentium1/Mac), add GNU/Linux, a network card and as much disk space as it can support. If it can support two drives, consider RAID or if it's too low spec for proper RAID, just a cron job using rsync. Yes, hard discs fail but if you have your data on multiple hard drives, you reduce the risk. Multiple machines in different locations reduces the risk even further. I'm lucky, I suppose, most of my "data" is actually source code which in a free software environment means there are *lots* of backups all over the place. My own code is in on multiple systems at home and in CVS elsewhere between releases; released code is mirrored for me at SF and Debian; email is principally via publicly archived mailing lists or the Debian BTS; work in other projects is often done via patches sent to the BTS - making source code public is a fantastic way of reducing / eliminating the risk of hardware failure crippling a project. Anyone can have a copy; every copy is a backup. What's more, public copies get cached by Google, providing another copy. I used to make regular backups to CDR. Now I just tend to rsync to recycled machines on the LAN. An improvised RAID using multiple machines instead of multiple drives within one machine. It's not perfect but no backup method is perfect. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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