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Data Storage Technology

Might Flash Memory be a Viable Backup Medium? 84

Posted by Cliff from the keep-away-from-strong-magnetic-fields dept.
General Books asks: "Rather than fuss over mechanical failures and damaged media, why not use flash memory for backups? We maintain about 100 servers distributed to customers' sites. Each night we copy a backup of critical data (generally less than 128MB) to removable media in case the hard drive fails. We have experienced high failure rates with CDRWs and so now I am considering some sort of flash memory like a USB key drive. They are solid-state and you can get a 128MB device for $20. They seem ideal to me, but I can't find solid evidence. One question is how would they endure a lightning strike (perhaps not as good as an optical medium)? Admittedly, there is a wide variety of CDRW drives and media but don't they all seem risky compared to a solid-state device? More info about my circumstances: We have no network for backups. A second hard disk is not viable because it could not be rotated offsite. Tape drives are relatively expensive and overkill for our volume of data."
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Might Flash Memory be a Viable Backup Medium? More

Might Flash Memory be a Viable Backup Medium?

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  • How about CD-R ? (Score:3, Informative)

    by orkysoft ( 93727 ) <orkysoft@myreal b o x . c om> on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:37PM (#6809679) Journal
    You mentioned that CD-RWs weren't all that good, and I have the same experience, but why not try normal CD-R discs? They're cheap and pretty reliable. You can even make multiple backup copies if you want, or a multi-session disc to store several backups on one CD to cut costs.

  • external HD (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:37PM (#6809683)
    A USB or Firewire external drive would store far more data and could be rotated offsite.
    • A USB or Firewire external drive would store far more data and could be rotated offsite.

      You never use a device like a HD for backing up critical data.

      You see, tapes themselves are pretty robust, the thing that is most likely to fail is the tape drive - which can easily be replaced. If a HD fails, what are you going to do, transplant the platters onto a new spindle? *LOL*
      • You see, tapes themselves are pretty robust, the thing that is most likely to fail is the tape drive - which can easily be replaced.

        Ever used an exabyte on a sun? At least I wouldn't trust my data to it, if I didn't have a backup somewhere else... Even floppies are more reliable...

        As all media, tapes and tapedrives come in different qualities. Just saying that it's "tape", doesn't mean it's secure.

        If a HD fails, what are you going to do, transplant the platters onto a new spindle? *LOL*

        And why shou

  • I don't do offsite backups (Score:5, Funny)

    by the_other_one ( 178565 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:41PM (#6809699) Homepage

    When that place burns I want to be sure all the evidence goes up in smoke.

  • Questions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mugnyte ( 203225 ) * on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:47PM (#6809731) Journal
    So let me think this through... you are trying to store small amount of data on individual items. Why? Once in storage, are they kept apart fro one another?

    I think a RAID will suffice. Locally. If you need to keep it on the cheap, pump your small amount of data to 3 other simple boxen offsite. I mean, for small amounts of data, there's no reason to muck around juggling the physical medium. One can duplicate that data faster and more reliably than boxes of little memory cards with scribble on them.

    If you need to go cheaper, try floppies! W00T!

    mug

  • Carry the flash memory on you (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:49PM (#6809739)
    If you carry it with you when you aren't actively backing it up, you don't have to worry about lightning, fire or whatever. If you are struck by lightning, burnt in a fire or in some other way destroyed, you won't really miss the data.

  • Rotating HDDs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Breakerofthings ( 321914 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:51PM (#6809754)
    Or why not get yourself a few of those neato caddies that hold a HDD, and allow you to swap them out (internally; I am not talking about external enclosures) they are available for IDE, and the more expensive ones (claim to) allow hot swapping, even (I cannot personally verify how well the hot swap feature works or doesn't ...). I have seen them that even allow you to lock them in place with a key; how cool is that?

    Much cheaper in the long run, in terms of media costs, at least for large quantities of data. Especially if you score some inexpensive smaller drives (like a surplus batch of 10 GB or so)

    Hell, if you went all the way and just put an inexpensive RAID controller in there, it might pay off in the simplification of your backup procedures ... i.e. just pull a drive, and put a fresh one in, let the card rebuild it for you; backup your whole system if you like. Restoring doesn't get much easier than that, either.

    Here is one made by 3ware [3ware.com]
    Here is one made by Promise [promise.com]
    There are plenty of other, cheaper ones out there, too
    • This is what i was thinking, this is what we use in our workgroup of 16,000 pc's. no matter what form factor the pc is we can slide hd's in and out quite simply.

      The disadvantage of flash is it has an estimated limit of one million writes that could be reached quite quickly doing backups. why not invest $20 in the hard drive caddy's?

      • Re:Rotating HDDs (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ivan256 ( 17499 ) *
        Let's say you fill the entire card every backup... At one backup a day you could use the card for 1000 years without exceeding the write limits of the card. Hardly a disadvantage when you consider that unlike a hard drive, the flash will still work after you drop it.
        • Well lets assume 100 keys, now where i work there are aproximatly 150 workgroups, and my workgroup has 16,000 work stations in it. I could easily reach the write limits in a year.

          Dropping hard drives? While definatly a risk however it is minimal when you work in a profesional shop like mine.
          • Dropping hard drives? While definatly a risk however it is minimal when you work in a profesional shop like mine.

            Why, because you have 3 inch thick foam padding covering the entire floorspace, or because you all wear sticky gloves?
          • So you overwrite each key 160 times a day?

            I don't buy it. That doesn't give you any protection. It's each cell in the flash chip that has a limit, not the entire chip. If you fill all the keys once a day you can use the card for 1000 years (Something else will probably happen to it by then, but you get the picture). It doesn't matter if you fill them all at once or you fill them in 160 little bursts.

            And don't give me any crap about FAT wear. Just because you *can* do something stupid like use FAT16 on a f
    • The hot-swap features are dubious. They technically won't hurt the drive, but your OS will be royally pissed at you if you yank a drive right off an IDE chain. Particularly if it was jumpered as Master.

      There's a simple solution, though: USB/Firewire external drives have support in the drivers for hot connection and disconnection. Usually you have to click an icon to tell the drivers to prepare, but after a moment you'll be permitted to remove such a device. "But!", you say, "that's an extra power supply an

  • I've had no luck with Flash Media (Score:5, Informative)

    by xanderwilson ( 662093 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @08:53PM (#6809761) Homepage
    I cross my fingers (no, not literally) every time I've inserted a piece of Flash Media into my camera, PDA, or USB drive. I find that about one in every 20 times the disk comes up empty. I take good care of them (three different media types), but I don't find them reliable at all. I'd sooner use CD-Rs (though now I might start backing those up every 2 years on new CD-Rs.

    Alex.
    • Maybe I ask what kind of flash media you use? I have been using flash media for years, including 2 SD cards, 2 MMC cards, 3 MemorySticks, 2 CF cards, and 1 SmartMedia card. And I have never experienced any problem with them.
      • Memory Stick, SD card (2 brands Lexar and SanDisk), and I want to say SmartMedia for the camera. I've also used one of those keychain-type USB jobs. Memory Stick was probably the most reliable of the bunch (though not without problems), but none of my current stuff uses Memory Stick.

        Alex.
        • I find that memorysticks are very reliable as long as you don't write to them from the PC. They're fine as long as you only write to them from the camera (so obviously not any good for what this guy wants). If you do write from the PC (and I've tried this under linux and windows) then they totally blank the card pretty frequently. We scanned them and the problem is an incompatability between the way the hardware devices (like sony cameras) and the software drivers write to them. If you really want the data
    • I have one of the M-Systems 16MB USB keychain jobs (admittedly a few years old now) and 90% of the time comes up empty when I move it from computer to computer. Same host OS, different host OS, doesn't matter. I let the machine (2000/xp) install it's own drivers while 95/98 machines I download the drivers from M-Sys. Do I need to flash my flash device for some updated firmware or any idea why this thing bites? I should get a newer one and try it back to back....

      Thanks for any info....

      -m
      • On Windows machines you have to "eject"(stop the device totally sometimes to get the files copied to the device. I have experienced similar problems and a clean stop before removal will do the trick.
        • amlai is right; flash media has "delayed writes", just the same as hard drives. Now the problemmmmmmmm......... is that some USB flash media doesn't have an "eject" item on its context menu. Unless it's Windows itself that provides the "eject" feature, in which case.... where the hell did it go in XP? I've had all sorts of problems with my flash media just because I couldn't find the "eject" menu item! Fie and pox upon them! (please mod me up for calling down a pox on Microsoft)
          • I've had a similar problem too. Here's what you do: Go into your control panel. Find the device (under System or whatever). Go to properties. There should be a checkbox there for 'removable'. Make sure it's checked.
            • --I know that in W98 at least, there's also a setting that you can un-check. Right-click on "My computer, Properties, "Performance\File system\Removable Disk\Enable write caching on all removable drives."

              --This may slow things down but at least all your writes will be committed.

        • There should be an icon with a green arrow with all the others in the tray. If you click on it, select the option that says "safely remove hardware." It will then display a bubble which states it's safe to remove your hardware.
    • I set up my powerbook 1400cs with two Flash PCMCIA cards. One is used as a boot disk and the second one is used as VM (virtual memory e.g. swap) both of them are 256mb and work fantastically. I removed the internal HD now I get about 6-7 hours of charge. While researching the effectiveness of using Flash in this manner I found some reports as to its low number of writes before breakdown but so far I've had no problems with the card I use as VM (swap).

      NarratorDan
      • I've been thinking of doing this, not just with a laptop, but with a few mini-atx machines I have at home. BUT.. noone can tell me the average life cycle (ie Read/writes) of a CF card. Since the media is flash, there has to be some limit to the amount of times you can read/write them. I've been warned by various others doing this not to allow windows/*nix to create a swap file on the CF card, since that would result in unknown numbers of read/writes..

        Does anyone know the magic number for this, or is th
        • It's extremely card dependant. Flash chips vary between 10,000 and 1,000,000 erases per erase unit (often 32 or 64Kbytes). However, the card can do write-balancing, which moves data around to even out the number of erases each EU receives.

          So, you are extremely unlucky if you get less than 10,000 write cycles. A million should be about right, more is good luck :)

    • I've had extremely good luck with my CF cards. I first started using them personally when I bought a Canon digital camera, and as long as the reader device worked properly with my computer (various OSes and readers tested), the data was always there. I read them as FAT drives (I never used above 48M cards, because my Powershot A5 supposedly can't use anything higher, so higher sizes might use FAT32). In fact, I think I remember using Ontrack's data recovery software to recover some files I accidentally dele
      • I've used "PC Inspector File Recovery" with great success in recovering files from a smartmedia card that I accidentally deleted from the camera's interface. Compactflash should be similar.

        CF cards shouldn't get wet! They have plenty of space inside for moisture to linger. You got lucky. If I got a CF card wet and it didn't work after blowing the holes dry, I'd crack it open and rinse the innards with alcohol, then try again. I've got pics of the insides of a CF card on my photo gallery [rtor.net] under the Tech albu

  • Been there... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shadwwulf ( 145057 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:10PM (#6809834) Homepage
    I work for a university as an educational content developer. We are in the same situation in that our whole codebase doesn't break the 100 meg mark but needs to be kept extremely safe given that it represents months and months of man hours.

    We had a lot of bad luck with CDRW's and ended up dropping that idea and moving to a dual backup system. We do intremental backups to CD-R's and make two copies. Secondly we push the content to an FTP site that is elsewhere on campus. The FTP site is backed up seperately onto tape as added an precaution.

    Just my $.02

  • Er, wait. (Score:4, Informative)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:11PM (#6809841)

    Before you give up on CD-R/CD-RWs, try this:

    • Make sure you have a decent CD drive. If you have a first-generation CD-R drive, replace it. Lite-on is cheap, but seems to do well in reviews.
    • Burn at the lowest possible speed for a better burn.
    • Verify DMA settings for each device.
    • For an IDE burner and an IDE hard drive, keep the hard drive on a separate channel from the burner. For example, set up the hard drive as primary master, and the CD drive as secondary master.
    • Keep the burned CDs in a cool, dark place. Use a jeweled case for each to prevent scratches.

    I don't see any reason why USB flash media wouldn't work for backups if the OS supports it. The only problem is that USB flash media is more expensive then CD-Rs. $20 will buy you enough CD's for a monthly 'archive' (12 CDs/1 per month), plus a weekly backup/incremental daily backup (4 per month), even if you don't reuse the weekly backup media (personally, with the cost per CD, I wouldn't). However, to implement such a system with USB flash drives (assuming $20/drive), would cost $320 dollars.

    I love my USB flash drive, but its not cost effective for backups.

    • "Better burn" ??

      Can someone confirm this? This sounds like the bullshit that some audiophiles spout in reviews of hardware.

      • Explanation:

        A CD is a collection of pits, and the reflective quality of each pit is in a different range depending on if the bit is a 0 or a 1. A CD burner uses a dye in each pit, and the stronger laser in a burner chemically changes the reflectivity of the dye. At higher speed, less time is spent on each pit, which allows less energy for the chemical change. At lower speeds, more time is spent on each pit, which allows more energy for the chemical change. (At least for CD-Rs, CD-RWs don't use dyes a

        • At higher speed, less time is spent on each pit, which allows less energy for the chemical change. At lower speeds, more time is spent on each pit, which allows more energy for the chemical change.

          Which is why the higher speeds use a more powerful beam to compensate.
      • I didn't make the comment, but I know what he's talking about.

        Sweetwater Sound [sweetwater.com], a seller of professional studio audio equipment has written several articles in their InSync [sweetwater.com] newsletter, including this one [sweetwater.com].

        They don't give a technical reason why, but their experience (which I trust) is that different burn speeds produce different bit-level error rates (BLERs) and most drives seem to have their lowest BLERs at 2x speeds (surprisingly, not 1x). These shouldn't affect data discs, since ISO-9660 incorporates

    • 1) Slowest speed possible doesn't mean best burn. You may actually have to experiment. Frequently higher speed drives have less-than-accurate servos and do better when they aren't trying to keep the speed down. Pick a slower integer factor of the highest rated speed and use that.

      2) Buy a lot of CDs, and not only back up the CDs, but have a schedule where you regularly duplicate older copies onto new media. CD-Rs can have short lifetimes (and can be damaged during handling). Check your md5sums after each bu
  • I can still read CD-R and CD-RW discs that I recorded 4 years ago without any problem. The only disc read errors I've had stem either from horribly scratched media or dying CD-ROM drives. Maybe you should just experiment with different burners and media and see what happens.

    On the subject of flash media, I haven't heard of any tests saying they have any real reliability. They were created to share files easily and quickly, not for long term storage as CD media (in theory at least) was.

  • Huh? (Score:3)

    by rmohr02 ( 208447 ) <mohr.42@osuCHICAGO.edu minus city> on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:24PM (#6809890)
    [Y]ou can get a 128MB [USB storage] device for $20
    Where, may I ask?
    • http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?descript ion=20-167-108&refer=pricewatch
      http://shop.store .yahoo.com/digi4me/mem12usbflas.h tml

      The 256 is about $50-55, 512 is avail for less than $100.

      It's a pretty good deal they have going now adays.

  • How about... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by EaTiN cOfFeE bEaNs ( 513655 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @09:29PM (#6809912) Homepage
    one of these perhaps? [thinkgeek.com]
    • No, buy some of these [apple.com] and get a few of these [apple.com].

      Appearently you can actually boot from the iPods, although the older models with built-in FW connectors were easier to carry along to the serverroom.

  • Limited writes (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @10:14PM (#6810194) Homepage Journal
    Flash RAM has quite a limited number of writes. This can cause problems if you're writing large numbers of small files to flash RAM as it can cause a huge number of writes to the FAT area of the device. This may have been solved with different file systems, but I recall reading a story of one person who was getting failures. CD-RW discs avoid this problem by preparing the files and writing them in a single batch.

    Is the "generally less than 128MB" before or after compression? A nice compression package like 7-zip [7-zip.org] might get the files down to a size that can be emailed off-site each night.

    • Argh, postus interruptus.
      I recall reading a story of one person who was getting failures...
      who was getting failures during the first job because they were writing something like half the number of files to the device as a single area could cope with in writes and the FAT got updated twice for each file.

    • Flash RAM has quite a limited number of writes. This can cause problems if you're writing large numbers of small files to flash RAM as it can cause a huge number of writes to the FAT area of the device.

      That's odd. Flash sees heavy use in routers [cisco.com]. When I was an engineer for a Tier 1 provider, being conservative and cautious always meant saving more often, not less :)

      Oh, by the way, if you think Flash is bad for a storage medium, some Juniper routers have an LS-120 floppy drive for backup [juniper.net] :)

      • The flash in routers doesn't see a huge number of writes (our Cisco ADSL modem/router got its first OS upgrade ever last weekend, and has had its configurations options changed maybe four times) and probably is written in a proprietory format designed to prolong its life.

        • The flash in routers doesn't see a huge number of writes (our Cisco ADSL modem/router[...]

          I'm not talking about consumer-grade devices that aren't reconfigured often, I'm talking about "production" equipment used as regional aggregates, that have T-1 and DS-3 and other cards hanging off them, that get updates every day as new circuits get put in, existing circuits get changes in IP routing, interfaces get shut down because customers don't pay the bills or get caught spamming, etc.
          Devices that might see

          • You're seriously trying to tell me that production routers would use slow flash rather than battery backed-up SDRAM?

            • You're seriously trying to tell me that production routers would use slow flash rather than battery backed-up SDRAM?

              Have you tried going to Cisco's website and looking for yourself? Oh, wait, silly me, I forgot this is Slashdot.

              Here you go. [cisco.com]

              Oh, and here's a link for Juniper [juniper.net], also.

              A backup has to be reliable. It doesn't have to be fast, because it's not where the config actually runs. That's RAM, but there's no need for it to be battery-backed, because you always save your config... don't you?

            • You're seriously trying to tell me that production routers would use slow flash rather than battery backed-up SDRAM?

              Absolutely. They all do. If you were making high-end routers, you would do.

              Do you think AT&T (or any other big service provider) would buy a router that might lose all of its configuration data as a result of a dead battery? Do you think they could afford the maintenance costs of routinely checking and replacing batteries in all of their routers worldwide? We're talking thousands

    • Compact flash is addressed much like any other drive, but often the card's own logic distributes writes so that all portions of the card are used evenly. This is called "wear leveling" and extends the life of the card. The problem is that cheap no-name manufacturers don't implement it, so do a little research before picking one. Also, I hear that some of the nicer cards remap failed sectors and do read after write verification, though at the expense of speed. Again, check into the specs of the more respecte
  • You say there's generally less than 128MB of data which needs to be backed up; how much of that is new each day?

    If most of that data isn't changing, you could use those antique things called phone lines to transmit the differences.

  • More info please! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Bourbon Man ( 76846 )
    What operating system are you running? How long do you need to keep each days data? Does it need to be stored offsite? Is this data security sensitive?

    An extra hard drive and cron works wonders on a Linux or Novell server. I assume the task scheduler and a set of .bat files on a Windows server would work similarly. Make directories on the backup HD corresponding to day of week/month and automate a job to copy the data to the appropriate backup directory. Automate a job to tar/gzip or zip said backups. Aut

  • Flash memory and remote backup (Score:3, Informative)

    by Halvard ( 102061 ) on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @11:30PM (#6810636)

    Rather than fuss over mechanical failures and damaged media, why not use flash memory for backups? We maintain about 100 servers distributed to customers' sites. Each night we copy a backup of critical data (generally less than 128MB) to removable media in case the hard drive fails.

    Both of these would be my recommendation. I use flash media to boot firewalls, routers and embedded servers that run from RAM drives (nearing 100 deployed at customer sites and in our network). But I automount a partion on CF modules for logs. Flash memory is very reliable; it's rated at about 100,000 destructive writes. Read that as wiping it out, reformating it, not as I wrote to /var/log/messages for a week and the media toasted because somebody's machine caused the firewall to log crap every 2 seconds for a week. If it wasn't reliable, Cisco wouldn't use it for non-volatile storage (neither would I).

    The way we handle server backups is for servers to backup via a script to a tar.gz file over a private T-1 for servers. Granted, this amounts to a lot of GB for us but if you use something like rdiff-backup [stanford.edu] or a more simple script that backups up your files across the net through an SSH tunnel, you should be in pretty good shape. CDRWs are a poor choice if you can't or won't rotate media routinely. Especially since their lifespan for writes is low. You or your customer will have to rotate if you use CDRWs.

  • Paper (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jayrtfm ( 148260 ) <jslash@soph[ ].com ['ont' in gap]> on Wednesday August 27, 2003 @11:36PM (#6810668) Homepage Journal
    you can always Print out [parc.com] the info. If you're really worried about lightning you can use a laser printer [camtech.ca] and marble
  • that's only one part of the story.

    most of the restores i've ever done have been because some clueless user has accidentally deleted a file, three weeks ago, and only just realised they need it. if you're continually wiping out your old backups then you're fucked.

    don't think "what do i want to backup?" think - "what do i want to be able to restore?"

  • Google (Score:4, Informative)

    by Molina the Bofh ( 99621 ) on Thursday August 28, 2003 @12:09AM (#6810833) Homepage
    The best way to know the answer (as always) is RTFMing.

    You can read the Compact Flash FAQ [compactflash.org]

    A quick google search returned these links, that may be interesting to you

    IDE to Compact Flash Adapter [acscontrol.com]

    Flash Storage Solutions [allmatics.com]

    Read all this thread if you will be storing sensitive information [derkeiler.com]

    How Compact Flash can keep your data safe? [hp.com]

    This guy [kenrockwell.com]has an opinon different from mine. He says that, all of a sudden, he lost hundreds of picture. Well, I've been working with Compact Flash for more than one year, now, and the ONLY time I gost corrupted data was when I took the card off the camera while it was writing. Then the camera could not read any picture. They seemed to be lost. But later I put that CF in my CF reader, and ran a chkdsk. It found lost chains, that I saved as files. And recovered ALL pictures except for the bottom half of the one it was writing at the very moment when I removed the CF. It probably corrupted the FAT (same way as hard disks, when the computer is not properly shut down).

    And I do think CF is more reliable than Microdrive.

    • And I do think CF is more reliable than Microdrive.

      Now there's an understatement. Solid-state versus a tiny little hard drive. Drop both into your pocket without any protective cases, let them bang up against each other, your keys, loose change, and the side of your desk as you swing into your chair, for a few weeks. Step on them accidentally (on purpose) when you change clothes at the gym, or when you're at home with your honey (Slashdot regulars excluded) and in a hurry to undress...

      Microdrives are c

  • Forget the DLTs. Look for a college friend who is working at another company in the same city and is also assigned the task of backups. Give her a user account on your firewall get a user account on hers. Now setup perl scripts to encrypt the backup data on your site, bzip2 it and then transfer it to her site... and she should do the same for her site... swapping offsite space and gaining even a few GBs of space is quite enough for good backups. Just be sure your Internet connection does not come with downl

  • You could try M-Systems [m-sys.com]'s products like DiskOnChip [m-sys.com] or even their IDE/SCSI Flash Disks [m-sys.com].

    I'm working with embedded systems (Linux) in my company and I'm very pleased with the DiskOnChips despite their half-proprietary driver with which you can only generate kernel modules, not compile it into the kernel for legalese reasons. The DiskOnChips work way more reliable than any other flash chips I've used so far, with no defects yet (and we use them just like normal hard-disks currently).

    Granted, it could be just

  • You're right that optical media, or anything that rotates only when being accessed, is very secure in the event that the machine takes a hit while the media is in the drive. For this reason, you might want to keep the CD-RW drives in the machines even if you're using a different technique for nightly backup, and do weekly backups to an RW disc or something.

    A USB flash device, left plugged in to the machine for days at a time, would be connected to the PC's power supply during such a strike and might sustai
  • I think this was one of the most compelling reasons for getting a zip drive back in the day. Quick, cheap backup of 100 megs. Or with modern drives 250Megs. The media is cheap ($20 per disk), the drives are relatively cheap ($100) and they've never failed me. Except for the paralell drive that got the click of death, but the media didn't get corrupted.
    • Except for the paralell drive that got the click of death, but the media didn't get corrupted.

      Then you got lucky. Most of the time, inserting good media into a click-of-death drive would result in damaged media. And damaged in such a way that insertion into a new drive would damage it (resulting in more click-of-death.)

      I personally have never had click-of-death problems in my Zip drives (I own four, and regularly use 6 or 7 - mostly 100M drives, but one is a 250.) I once had the drive click a lot on

  • In my personal experience, I've found the most reliable backup storage medium to be magnetic media. It can be hard drives, tapes, Zip disks, SyQuest, whatever.

    In my personal experience, all of them have been more reliable than optical or flash media.

    Since you're talking about less than 128M per backup, I'd seriously consider a Zip-250 drive. They're fast and

    You should also be able to get an inexpensive tape drive. The old DAT/DDS-1 standard stores 1.3GB on a cheap 60m tape, which more than enough s

  • Would backing up to an offsite FTP account or two provide the protection you need? You could host it yourself or have an ISP with its own backups host it for extra protection. It may even be straighforward to automate depending on your setup. You can use GPG [gnupg.org] to encrypt the backups if you are concerned for their privacy in transit or at the backup storage site.
  • Any type of medium is good for backup. Just factor the possible costs and hopefully they fall within your budget and needs.

    Since your backup is 128meg, you should factor a backup medium that has some room to grow. What do you do if one night your working late and your backup is 135meg? Skip it and wait for the next day to buy another key? So lets up your USB key to 256meg.

    CDRW's, lets say they fail every 20 uses. 365 days a year, 20 uses per disc. That will be ~19 discs per year. @ $40 per 25 pack. $40

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