Valent Turkovic wrote: > On Feb 9, 2008 7:15 PM, Jacques B. <jjrboucher@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> 2008/2/9 Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: >> >> >>> Valent Turkovic writes: >>> >>> >>>> How would you backup 1TB of data in a server with 4x 250GB drives all >>>> mounted as separate mount points to a set of dvds using tools >>>> available in fedora, centos or rhel? >>>> >>> One terabyte divided by 8 gigabytes per double-layer DVD comes out to 125 >>> DVDs per backup. >>> >>> Are you out of your freaking mind? >>> >>> >> If a dual layer takes 10 minutes to burn (just a guess, don't own one) >> including time to prep the next one, it would take you 1250 minutes, >> or just over 20 hours of continuous burning. That doesn't factor in >> the time to chunk up your drive accordingly. So you'd have to be >> offline for at least 2 days. Your dual layers would cost you about >> $125. A 1TB external drive starts at around $300. Is it worth all >> that time & effort to try and save $175? >> >> Jacques B. >> > > Ok, how would you backup 50GB then. Ignore 1TB. The question still stands. > > Valent. > > > Like (almost) everyone else here in this forum, I simply can't advise using DVDs for backing up that amount of data. There are better solutions. 1. Put a 60 Gb laptop hard drive in an external 2.5" hard drive enclosure, connect the enclosure to a USB port, format the drive, and copy your 50 Gb of data to it. Total time to do the copy is a few short minutes at most. Not hours as with DVD. 2. Better yet, get a Western Digital Passport drive in any size 80 Gb and over, plug it in to a USB port, and do step #1. You can back up more data this way. 3. Copy your data using scp to another machine. This can be slow depending on your internet connection, but someone I know transferred 1.2 Gb to offsite backup this way at 19 kbps. It took 28 hours but the backup is offsite and the person simply started it and forgot it during that time, until it ws finished. DVDs scratch from handling, are very bulky, are hard to keep in exact order, use huge amounts of your time, and you never know if a given backup DVD had a bad burn. Any of the 3 methods above provides a more time-efficient approach. And you won't have to carry around hundreds of DVDs that soon become a disorganized mess. Bob Cochran Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
