Offsite backup strategy?

If I wanted to always keep a reasonably-current backup set offsite (and rotate them every week), how would I do this with QRecall?

With Retrospect, I create two DVD backup sets and just alternate each week which backup set I'm backing up to.

Is the same functionality available in QRecall? Any support for DVD media?

Thanks!
.../j

QRecall doesn't directly support write-once media like DVD or tape. How QRecall manages rolling incremental backups is fundamentally incompatible with this type of media.

If your archive fits on a DVD, or you have software what will span data across multiple DVDs (such as Toast Titanium), you can simply burn your working archive to DVD(s) once a month and keep that copy off-site.

There have been a few requests to add this capability directly to QRecall, and it's being considered.

What if I used external hard drives instead and just rotated those off-site??

Does QRecall support multiple backup sets (one per external drive)?

.../j

jch wrote:What if I used external hard drives instead and just rotated those off-site??

That would work just fine.

Does QRecall support multiple backup sets (one per external drive)?

QRecall doesn't care how many archives you have or how you organize them.

If you did this I would suggest creating two sets of capture and maintenance actions, one for each archive (let's call them A and B). In each action, add the "Ignore If No Archive" condition. When the drive with A is plugged in, all of the A actions will run and the B actions will be ignored. When you remove A and replace it with B the opposite will happen.

Remember not to leave a hard drive sitting unused for too long. The surface of a hard disk is (literally) fluid and is not designed for extended storage without being turned on. As long as each drive gets spun up and used at least once a month, you should be OK.

surface of a hard disk ... is not designed for extended storage

I hadn't heard this before; where can I find more info?

Thanks,

Marc

Marc Farnum Rendino wrote:I hadn't heard this before; where can I find more info?

That's a good question. To some degree, I'm guilty of repeating the conventional wisdom of the backup industry. This has been considered a "fact" for more than a decade, but finding a reliable source to corroborate it is difficult.

There's really very little information on the effects of long-term storage of HDDs. Even Google's massive study (Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population) essentially ignores the issue of shelf-life because no one uses hard drives that way.

It's still a widely held belief that hard drives have a shelf-life of about 5 years. I'm very confident that hard drives have much shorter shelf-life than optical or tape media, but knowing exactly how much is problematic. A big confounding issue is that hard drive technologies continue to evolve. Drives made 5 years ago might have a shelf-life of 5 years, but drives made today might have a shelf-life of 20 — or 2.