[TriLUG] Availability of bzip2 in 20 years?

[Cristobal Palmer]

John and Rodney both have good points, but if you're seriously going
to dig up the backups in 7 or 10 years, why not only have DVD
snapshots from once every six months (or so) and then throw Very Large
Disks (tm) in an old clunker and point rsync at your important
directories for more frequent backups? Disks aren't so expensive that
replacing them every three years (or so) would pose a tremendous
hardship. You could even get crafty and set up the backup box to do
wake-on-lan:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/net/wakeonlan

So you don't suck power when not doing backups. Also, the output of
smartctl inspires confidence for me in a way that DVDs do not, but
that says more about the way I treat optical media than about backup
strategies. :P

Or you could skip most of the above and pay for some off-site storage
space. Point rsync at somebody else's colo'd server.

So I guess what I'm really saying is that I agree with others that a
backup strategy that involves you not touching the data for 20 years
isn't really a viable strategy. I am not an archivist, but there you
have it.

-CMP

On 11/26/06, Rodney Radford <rradford at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> Ummm, I still have an 800 bpi 9-track tape as a 'backup' of some old files from NCSU when I left my undergraduate degree...  I guess I am probably in trouble, eh?
>
> But the best answer is that if you really care about what is on the DVDs, or any format, is to transfer them over to new formats/compressions as they come along.  That way your media and file format are always 'current' enough.  If you don't transfer them, or remember them, then perhaps you didn't miss them (like the files on my 9-track tape).
>
> >>I'm considering backing up to bzip2 instead of gzip (.tgz) to
> >>pack more on a single DVD. <end snip>
>
> >Steve, you are missing something here. In 20 years you will not have a
> >device that is capable of "reading" a DVD. (That assumes that the
> >plastic disk is still in working order also.)
> >   Not counting one in the closet, do you still have a 5 1/4" flopply
> >drive on your PC? That is 20 year old technology. The IBM 3.5" flopply
> >came into being only 19 years ago:
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2
> >   I don't even want to think about all those 20 years old back-up tapes!  :)
>
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-- 
Cristobal M. Palmer
UNC-CH SILS Student -- ils.unc.edu/~cmpalmer
TriLUG Vice Chair
"There are many roads to enlightenment, and thus many roads back to
the One True Debian" --crimsun