<Begin rant>
Oh jeez. I worked at a company that made tape drives and you do not want to use tapes ever. They are the slowest, most unreliable thing imaginable. Especially now that they are making them more and more dense and the media is exposed to the elements (unlike a disk platter).
Yeah, they use more redundant ECC than disks but I still wouldn't trust them at all. I had definitely drunk the kool-aid for a while and happily used tape for data transfer and not just backup. I can't tell you how many times I got stuck with a bad tape hours away (physically) from the original data, frustrated beyond belief. I firmly believe most people don't even know just how many of their tapes are corrupted because they've never tried to restore except for the initial testing period and the occasional file or two.
Tape sucks. Tape is dead. Long live disks.
<end rant>
> Another option is to copy your Time Machine out to S3 once a month. (Would probably take that long) but I don't know how you'd preserve the aliases / hard links.
One of the interesting things about time machine is how it deals with network backups. It creates an HFS+ disk image on the remote machine and then mounts that and does the backup to it instead of directly to the remote volume. It uses the "sparse bundle" style disk image which partitions the disk image into a bunch of 8mb slices. So you could rsync those slices to S3 daily or monthly or whatever and not worry about the format details at all.
<Begin rant> Oh jeez. I worked at a company that made tape drives and you do not want to use tapes ever. They are the slowest, most unreliable thing imaginable. Especially now that they are making them more and more dense and the media is exposed to the elements (unlike a disk platter).
Yeah, they use more redundant ECC than disks but I still wouldn't trust them at all. I had definitely drunk the kool-aid for a while and happily used tape for data transfer and not just backup. I can't tell you how many times I got stuck with a bad tape hours away (physically) from the original data, frustrated beyond belief. I firmly believe most people don't even know just how many of their tapes are corrupted because they've never tried to restore except for the initial testing period and the occasional file or two.
Tape sucks. Tape is dead. Long live disks. <end rant>
> Another option is to copy your Time Machine out to S3 once a month. (Would probably take that long) but I don't know how you'd preserve the aliases / hard links.
One of the interesting things about time machine is how it deals with network backups. It creates an HFS+ disk image on the remote machine and then mounts that and does the backup to it instead of directly to the remote volume. It uses the "sparse bundle" style disk image which partitions the disk image into a bunch of 8mb slices. So you could rsync those slices to S3 daily or monthly or whatever and not worry about the format details at all.