Tonight I'm feeling pretty bad - catching the creeping crud.

For the last few days we have been building and rebuilding off-site storage computers with several huge drives - and configuring rsync to mirror our data server off to it on a schedule, keeping multiple stages for posterity, etc. Today I spent trying to ensure that we are backing up all of the important servers, either by tar/smbtar/msbackup or rsync to a data server, and then the data server is rsynced to the new server offsite. Nice setup, thank Brian for the concept!

So while struggling with these servers & backup issues in a valiant effort to ditch Brightstor (tape backup system) completely, we get to meet with a couple of salesmen of... tape backup systems. *grin*

We listened to their spiel, gave them an overview of where we were and where we wanted to go, and for the life of me I still can't see why we would want to spend $50k+ on a library system that would mean we would still have to use BrightStor, or worse, buy some other backup software and use that.

Why, when we have onsite and offsite backup configured and automated (no human action required) for under $800?

The offsite box is a $400 dell server with four $98 Maxtor 120gb drives in it.

Heck, the onsite box is an inexpesive rack-mount 2u server with four $150 120gb drives in it. Bought them 2 years ago, that is why the expense.

For $1200 we can have a 1 terabyte external drive from LaCie, if we wanted it. Might get it later on if we need the capacity and don't have the time to build another station.