Hack #50. Make Disk-to-Disk Backups for Large Drives
Today's hard drives are large enough that you could spend the rest of your life backing them up to tape. Putting drive trays in your servers and using removable drives as a backup destination provides a modern solution.
Some of us are old, and therefore remember when magnetic tape was the de facto backup medium for any computer system. Disk drives were small, and tapes were comparatively large. Nowadays, the reverse is generally true— disk drives are huge, and few tapes can hold more than a fraction of a drive's capacity. But these facts shouldn't be used as an excuse to skip doing backups! Backups are still necessary, and they may be more critical today than ever, given that the failure of a single drive can easily cause you to lose multiple partitions and hundreds of gigabytes of data.
Luckily, dynamic device buses such as USB and FireWire ( a.k.a. IEEE 1094) and adaptors for inexpensive ATA drives to these connection technologies provide inexpensive ways of making any media removable without disassembling your system. Large, removable, rewritable media can truly simplify life for you (and your operators, if you're lucky enough to have some). A clever combination of removable media and a good backup strategy will make it easy for you to adapt disk drives to your systems to create large, fast, removable media devices that can solve your backup woes and also get you home in time for dinner (today's dinner, even). If you're fortunate ...
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