Re: Alternative Tape Backup Software

>I agree that there might be cases where you simply can't backup to
>tape, but if the computer room catches on fire, then you are SOL...

That's what a remote standby is for. You can also backup the standby.

In some places, it is not too unreasonable to not put every backup on tape, since the only reason to use it is if the computer room catches fire, but there may be other more time-sensitive requirements to restore from disk. I still use a fade-out sometimes - move the older filesets to slower or offline disks over a series of backup cycles. They slowly go away, but are relatively close should they be needed (and being able to quickly grab a particular set of arcs has saved me a couple of times). There's the redundant tape backup requiring more arcs should the disks go awry, or a sudden requirement to see something very old. I've had more problems restoring with bad tapes/incompatible tape drives than with disks (true going back 25 years over many platforms, actually).

Disks don't all need to be near the computer these days.

jg

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