[ale] Low-end tapedrives for SOHO environment

[Geoffrey]

griffisb at bellsouth.net wrote:
>> I'd really like to hear a valid reason for a FULL backup.  It's
>> just not necessary.  Backup your critical data, and as someone else
>> noted, a cdrom, or even better dvd should be plenty for such
>> purposes.
>> 
> 
> 
> You're probably right. For home use, burning /home to CD for my SuSE
> and RH boxes,

That wouldn't work for me:

denali/home/esoteric> du -sh /home/esoteric
6.7G    /home/esoteric

:)

> and My Documents for Win boxes should work fine. For
> the church I would need to backup the records database, payroll
> database, and any written info (if kept in My Documents - that should
> cover it).

Yeah, the key is to make sure folks put stuff in the right place.

> Full backups sound like a good thing as far as recovering from the
> inevitable power surges and occasional fried disks is concerned. But
> with a good hardware/software inventory and assuming original CD's
> are stored safely - PCs could be rebuilt and apps. reloaded.

I don't see it.  I think it'd be easier and faster to do a reinstall and 
then update with incremental backups.  There's really not an easy way to 
take a full backup to a down machine and easily put it back in the same 
state it was prior to a crash.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey                     Registered Linux User #108567
Building secure systems in spite of Microsoft