[Leica] Tape backup?

[hartzell at alerce.com (George Hartzell)]

Richard Man writes:
 > Hi Leo, the drive that just died is a Western Digital, but I have Seagate
 > dying on me too. I have half a dozen dead drives from a number of systems
 > in the drawer and half are probably Seagate and half are Western Digital.
 > 
 > Sonny, the problem is that if you do keep multiple copies, then by
 > definition, some of the older drives will be sitting around, and drives
 > that sit around is a concern as the lubricant may dry up.
 > 
 > Mark, the problem with drives use latest and greatest tech is that the
 > manufacturers are not concentrating on reliability, but on density (more 
 > TB
 > for the $). In fact, at some point, they switched from lifetime warranty 
 > or
 > 10 year down to 5. I won't be surprised if they are now just one year or
 > three year warranty.
 > 
 > Nevertheless, sounds like a cage with cheap internal drives may be an
 > option.

If you can find a reasonable chunk size that fits on a current drive
(3TB's are reasonable) then my current trick may work for you.

In addition to my normal Time Machine and super duper backups I have
an external esata/USB/firewire dock, something like this:

  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392022

  (not recommending this one, just an example)

and I rotate naked drives through it every 3 months or so.
Super-duper backups, time machine backups, zfs mirrors, depending on
the system.  The offsites go into the safety deposit box.

As long as individual hard drives stay ahead of some easily definable
chunk you could make this work.  Then you don't need to figure out a
way to stitch things together into a RAID.

g.