From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264565AbUBQKMu (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 Feb 2004 05:12:50 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264566AbUBQKMq (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 Feb 2004 05:12:46 -0500 Received: from cfcafw.sgi.com ([198.149.23.1]:46123 "EHLO omx1.americas.sgi.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264565AbUBQKMn (ORCPT ); Tue, 17 Feb 2004 05:12:43 -0500 Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 02:13:15 -0800 From: Paul Jackson To: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen) Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] remove obsolete onstream support from ide-tape in 2.6.3-rc3 Message-Id: <20040217021315.14ca7a9a.pj@sgi.com> In-Reply-To: References: <20040215221108.GA4957@serve.riede.org> <20040215153214.002dcc9a.pj@sgi.com> Organization: SGI X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.10claws (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org > but can't read anything more than about a decade old. Yes. One has to abandon the idea that offline storage is archival. It's just for disaster recovery. Archive online. Backup to removable disk, or, if you're Linus, everyone else's computer ;). I keep everything I've ever done that I might ever want to see again (DOS, Warp, Win, Irix, Linux, ...) on one disk, my current disk. It gets copied over, and appended to. If it's not on that disk or its backups, it no longer exists. Backups, now on removable IDE drives, only have to last a year or so, in case I didn't realize something was missing for a while. I'm working on a disk-to-disk backup program that is a radical departure from existing backups. It maintains a single version controlled ascii line oriented master list file, and plain copies of the backed up files, exactly one such copy per unique md5sum. It handles 50 Gbytes in 30 minutes (300+ files per second). 186 lines of Python. No tar, no cpio, no compression, no binary file formats, no streaming media; trivial and robust. The economics of backup and archiving have changed, with the continuing rapid decline in dollars/bytes of online storage. New strategies are called for. -- I won't rest till it's the best ... Programmer, Linux Scalability Paul Jackson 1.650.933.1373