Backup Solutions

[Dean Takemori]

> From: Tim Seufert <tas@mindspring.com>
> Subject: Re: Backup Solutions
> Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 21:10:33 -0800
> 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.

I'd pretty much come to the same conclusions (though I didn't think to
look at cartridge loaded hard drives).  Is it really the case that 
there are
simply _no_ reasonable(*) backup solutions for the home or home/hobbyist
market?

Just a rough guess at the statistics, but there must be O(1000) families
every single day in the US that lose important data (from their digital 
photos
and tax data to schoolwork) to data corruption or hard drive crashes.

(*) By reasonable, I mean that it should be inexpensive relative to the
cost of a mid-range desktop system, and that it should be easily 
accessible
to the average non-techie end-user doing home/school AV work

Tape fails the first test since Joe and Jane Average isn't going to 
shell
out more for a tape drive than they did for Jr. Average's eMac.

DVD fails the second test, since I refuse to believe that the 
aforementioned
users will stand for regularly backing up a modest 60G hard drive to 
8-12 DVDs