Re: "Maintaining offline backups is expensive and a lot of boring, repetitive work."
Robot ? Would you be referring to one of those expensive machines for handling tapes - the sort that our manglement would never ever have considered paying for, even if it would have been of practical use to us.
We were a fairly small outfit - so manual operations - pop into the server room, pull the tape out of the drive, pop the next one in, send the tape off to our off-site storage (our warehouse far enough down the road that if it went up along with the main site then we'd not care about trying to recover). DAT tape for the nightly backup of live data, and DLT for the weekly full system backup - with a fairly large store (OK, filing cabinet drawer) holding a couple of months of the nightly tapes, and a couple of years of the weeklies. We only got all that because tapes can be sneaked out of the op-ex budget !
And before you ask, no we didn't have spare drives we could test read the tapes on :-( And we didn't have spare hardware so we could do useful things like test full restores :-( I can tell you, major upgrades - of the "back up, wipe the disk array & re-configure (with more/bigger disks), restore" sort were "bum twitching" 8-O
Biting the hand that feeds IT
