I had a twitter chat with @JLivens the other day where the question was "what do you back up?" My first response was to, of course, say that I back up everything – thrice – cause I'm me. If you're curious, my critical personal data is synced on multiple computers with history using Dropbox (which…
I’ve posted and talked quite a bit about tape lately. I asked if we’ve put it out to pasture too soon. After participating in a Linked In thread from hell, I said that tape was a more reliable medium for long term storage. I talked about that last post on Infosmack 102, which should be…
Tape is inherently a more stable magnetic medium than disk when used to store data for long periods of time. This is simply “recording physics 101,” according to Joe Jurneke of Applied Engineering Science, Inc. I had heard rumblings of this before, but it was Joe that finally explained it in almost plain English in…
When I first heard about the EMC disk archiver, I blew my stack. I don’t remember exactly how it was presented to me, but what I heard was that EMC was coming out with a disk product that was designed to hold backups for seven years or more. Since storing backups for seven years or…
Server virtualization doesn’t kill storage. People kill storage. That’s all I’m saying. I get hot under the collar when I hear people say things like “server virtualization increases storage requirements by huge amounts.” They slam server virtualization with this comment, as if changing a server from being a physical one to being a virtual one…
[This story originally happened in 2007, but I just learned about it, so I blogged about it. Then I learned that it was a four-year-old story. Everything here still applies, even if the actual story is old. But I did re-edit the story and change it’s title because the original wording seems a bit…
A week at NABShow (National Association of Broadcasters) and two days at Tape Summit last week have given me a chance to revisit my thoughts on tape. Here’s a brief summary of how my opinion of tape has changed over the years: Stage 1: Tape was it. It was all I knew. Backing up to…
I attended my first SNW conference in over two years last week. (My previous employer was really good at scheduling me for competing events, so I wasn’t able to go.) Most of my thoughts about what I saw go hand-in-hand with Don Jenning’s thoughts here. I agree that it was very cool to see The…
The other day I wrote a blog entry that said encrypt your tapes but not your disks. My fundamental premise was that encrypting data at rest in your disk drives only protects from the thing that will never happen: someone walking out with an entire disk array under their arm. Single disk drives yanked out…
Update: My opinions on this have changed due to the comments written below.Steve Duplessie wrote a blog post inspired by the RSA hack . His post isn’t about that hack at all. But for the record, I agree with this guy who says “RSA Silent About Compromise For 7 Days – Assume SecurID Is Broken.”…