I’m currently in the market for backup tape drives – I’ve been getting worried about Hedwig’s current bacup scheme. It’s been quite reliable for us, but I would like just a bit more security than we currently have:
- the machine generates tarballs of our mudlib, web sites, and databases
- it then saves these on a separate hard drive that is dedicated to the purpose of holding our backup data
- we keep the backups for the most recent week and those of the last day of every month
- our administrators are encouraged to set up automatic downloading of these backups for storage on their own machinesI’m not sure if anyone is downloading the tarballs right now. I am also not horribly confident in the structural integrity of the hard drive in question. It used to be our primary drive, but was decommissioned after a series of minor problems.
Thus, I have recently placed 5 bids on ebay for tape drives. So far, three of the auctions have ended with me winning one of the drives for $20. It’s a good one, one of the auctions I lost was for another of the same model that sold for over $50. My two remaining auctions are ending in under 30 hours. I am really hopeful for one of them (it is internal) and will be very pleasantly surprised if I won the other (my current bid is $1.75).