[larrys]

"more than one physical back-up, in more than one location"

And to take that even one step further, one of the onsite versions that we do is to a fireproof drive. (Other versions are physically offsite as you mentioned).

Anyway on the onsite version the fireproof drive is physically disconnected (USB) from the computer after the backup is complete. (It could be powered off but that would spin up and spin down it seems less detrimental to not do that..)

But it gets even better. There is also hidden safe that contains hard drives only (which are encrypted). The safe is left unlocked (it's not physically attached and could be hauled away). In the unlocked safe, in addition to the hard drives, is some money (cash). The theory being that if someone breaks in and easily opens the safe (if they find it) they will take the money and leave the drives alone.

(This dates back from the same practice being done with cash registers you leave a little money so the thief doesn't trash your place. I know this will raise questions as far as having a tempting cash stash but it is known by only a select group of people and there are pros and cons to any approach obviously.)

[peterwwillis]

(It could be powered off but that would spin up and spin down it seems less detrimental to not do that..)

Uh, actually, you want to do that. First of all, spinning down does not do anything bad - it actually saves the life of the drive. Secondly, the whole point of backup tape robots is to constantly re-check tapes to see if they're readable, and report bad tapes to be replaced. You should really be turning off the drive, turning it back on, and doing a full disk block check to see if there's any corruption. Welcome to the nightmare that is backing up petabytes of enterprise data.

An unlocked safe? The whole point of a dummy safe is to make it seem like the real safe, so you keep it locked. And there's no reason they wouldn't take the extra two seconds to pick up some valuable intellectual property with their cash. What kind of crack are you people smoking, and what is your business so I can avoid it in the future?

[larrys]

"First of all, spinning down does not do anything bad - it actually saves the life of the drive."

That's your opinion I disagree. And it's not the spin down anyway. It's the spin up. You've also got the cycle on the on off switch for that matter as well as the power surge. Trivial but it's there. All in all the solution is to cut the cord. You also don't know if we are doing this procedure 1 time per month or 7 times per hour. Do you? So you make an assumption on what you think we are doing.

"Secondly, the whole point of backup tape robots is to constantly re-check tapes to see if they're readable, and report bad tapes to be replaced."

What in the world are you talking about? We don't have "backup tape robots" we have a hard drives that we backup our data to. You have no idea of how much data we are talking about nor do you know what the purpose of the backup is. Thanks for your concern and assumptions.

"nightmare that is backing up petabytes of enterprise data"

You are solving a different problem that we are working on. We don't have petabytes of data.

"And there's no reason they wouldn't take the extra two seconds to pick up some valuable intellectual property with their cash."

Once again you are making assumptions as far as the thief we are protecting against. You don't know where we are located and you don't know anything about, once again, what we are protecting.

"What kind of crack are you people smoking, and what is your business so I can avoid it in the future?"

Seriously, who writes stuff like that?

Your comment illustrates what happens when people try to learn something from what they read online (as PG says "don't believe what you read in online forums"). I've illustrated what we do which fits a particular purpose. You do something else. Neither of us provides (either time or space wise) enough detail for anyone to decide for themselves only gives information so they can further think about this.