Backup Solutions

[Tim Seufert]

On Jan 7, 2004, at 7:25 PM, Dean Takemori wrote:

> Ideally, I'd be able to find a mechanism in the $500 range, with a 
> firewire
> connection, ~50-100GB per cartridge/disk/tape whatever, with media 
> costs
> comparable to recordable DVD.
>
> Oh, and it would have drivers for OS X and Linux on PPC.

Probably the only thing which will come close to meeting all your 
requirements is a Firewire drive enclosure with one of those removable 
HD frames installed.  The frames fit in 5.25" half height bays, 
although they're usually longer than a CD-ROM so make sure you get an 
enclosure that's not too small.  Once you've got that, you just buy a 
bunch of the cartridges (which accept standard IDE hard drives) and 
drives to put in them.  You can swap drives in and out without 
rebooting by unmounting the drive, powering the enclosure down, 
swapping, then applying power again.

At the local Fry's, an ATA100 frame costs about $25 with one cartridge, 
and extra cartridges are $12 or so.  A Firewire enclosure will cost 
between $50 and $100.  So the startup cost is very cheap.  Media costs 
won't be comparable to recordable DVD, but you're going to have a hard 
time finding anything which is; 4.7 GB for $1-$2 is very cheap.  Your 
other option is tape, and last time I looked at tape the price per 
gigabyte was actually greater than the price per gigabyte of HD 
storage, at least for any tape technology that cost less than a 
kilobuck for the drive.

Hard drives aren't a totally ideal backup medium (they're not very 
robust against physical shock), but if you keep them powered off except 
when you're running a backup and take care when handling the 
cartridges, they should be quite reliable.  (Modern IDE drives are 
engineered to tolerate lots of spinup / spindown cycles because most 
are used in home computers; the old advice that HDs should be 
continuously powered for optimum reliability doesn't always apply to 
them.)