On Tue, 1 Jul 2014 09:20:28 zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:
I get the impression that some are looking for a single reliable storage solution to avoid having to do backups.
No that's not the aim. However you do want to reduce the need for external backups. Removable backup (which is necessary to cover lightning strikes etc) isn't something that you are going to do all the time. If you use your removable backup every week then a random restore can be expected to miss 3.5 days of changes. So there's a real benefit in not losing data. ZFS and BTRFS allow taking snapshots of the data. It's easy to write cron jobs that make snapshots regularly. If you have a snapshot every 30 minutes then for the most common uses of backups (deleting the wrong files) you will only lose 15 minutes of data on average.
I personally keep all data I consider important on four separate systems/devices one device (which is in fact duplicate items but differing technolgies) being kept off site. Maintaining this is a bit of a pain but there is no other way as far as I can see.
As Colin noted if you get corruption then it can go to all backups. Also if you have corruption in a backup it can go back to the main system on a restore. Use BTRFS or ZFS for the main data store and BTRFS for the backup media and you won't risk either of those problems. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/