Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

Red Hat Linux 7 Unleashed

By William Ball

Selecting a Backup Medium

Today, many choices of backup media exist, although the three most common types for a long time were floppy disks, tapes, and hard drives. Table 22.1 rates these media—and newer ones such as CD-ROM read-only and CD-RW—in terms of reliability, speed, availability, and usability.

Table 22.1. Backup Media Comparison

Medium Reliability Speed Availability Usability
Floppy disks Good Slow High Good with small amounts of data; bad with large amounts of data
CD-ROM RO Good Medium High Read-only media; okay for archives
CD-RW Good Medium Medium Read-write media; economical for medium-sized systems
DVD Good Slow Low Expensive
Iomega Zip Good Slow High 100-250MB storage; okay for small systems
Flash ROM Excellent Fast Low Very expensive; currently limited to less than 1GB
Tapes Good Medium/Fast High Depending on the size of the tape, can be highly usable; tapes cannot be formatted under Linux
Removable HD Excellent Fast High Relatively expensive, but available in sizes of 2GB or larger
Hard drives Excellent Fast High Highly usable

Writable CDs are good for archival purposes, and some formats, such as CD-RW, can be overwritten nearly 1,000 times; however, the expense in time tends to be high if a large number of regular archives or backups must be made. Flopticals, with attributes of both floppy and optical disks, tend to have the good qualities of floppy disks and tapes and are good for single file restoration. Flopticals can hold a lot of data, but have not captured the consumer market; they are popular in high-end, large-scale computing operations. More popular removable media are Iomega Zip and Jaz drives, which come in 100MB and 250MB Zip and 1–2GB Jaz form factors. Digital DAT tapes can hold many gigabytes of data, and are also popular.

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