> not really, a hard drive thats in a system is vulnerable to everything the
> system is vulnerable to (fire,theft,power issues etc). one that is not in
> a
> system is vulnerable to issues caused by long periods without a spinup
> (though admittedly theese aren't as serious as they used to be).
>
> they are also far more vulnerable to mechanical shock (e.g. your fire safe
> dropping down through the floors of your building and getting burried
> under
> rubble in the basement) than tapes and optical media.
>
> imo the only secure way to do backups with hard drives is to have both
> spun
> up regularlly but stored in different buildings or better still on
> different
> sites. A grandfarther father son system with all the drives taking a share
> of time as the main drive and at least one offsite at all times would
> probablly be pretty secure.


We do backups to a USB hard drive. Every night it backs up everything on
the network. It has a directory for each machine, then creates a
subdirectory based on the date. All drive contents are then copied into
that subdirectory. The USB drive can hold about 3 days of backups, so we
swap it out on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. When it's swapped out, the
boss takes it home so we have off site storage. In about 25 years, I've
never had a hard drive fail. I have had the OS write gargabe out to a
drive. That's why I really like an off-line backup as opposed to RAID or
some mirror system where the OS can also trash the "backup."

Harold


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