>>Anybody have any experience backing up to tape with Linux??
>>Any advice and/or actual experience with tapes and/or this drive/media
type would be appreciated.
Tape is great for backups, but sucks for restore. I stopped using it years
ago. I had too many customers burned by tapes that went bad. At one site,
they put in a 1 year old tape to recover a deleted file (deleted 11 months
earlier) and the tape gummed up the heads. Turned out almost all their
tapes would do that to any drive - including mine. All that data was lost,
as well as four drives. Tape is a house of cards that will fall down when
you need it most. Glad that client found out before a real disaster struck.
I built rack-mount PCs with 8 removable HDDs. We would run rotating backups
to the drive, changing one drive each day. We treated the drive just like a
tape, and took them offsite in rotation. Worked great, and it was easy to
verify the data often because it was so fast and easy. It was vastly better
than tape.
Later, we made a deal with the company across the street and ran fibre optic
between the two. Each company put a backup server on the other's property
(in a locked case). That gave us several levels of backup - RAID, internal
drive backup, Box-of-Disks backup, across-the-street server, off-site disk.
At work, we just ordered an LTO drive, because my PHB wants the "security"
of a backup tape in his hand. I considered getting a non working drive off
eBay to save a few bucks, since it's about as good as a working
drive...<grin>
Don't forget - with tape if you can't get a drive _and_ the backup software
to work, you can't get to the data on the tape. I can pull a HDD out of the
carrier and put it in any PC to get to the data. Something to really think
about. I've seen times where they didn't have a installable copy of the
backup software and were screwed.
Ken Elliott
=====================
-----Original Message-----
From: slug@nks.net [mailto:slug@nks.net] On Behalf Of Mike Branda
Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2005 4:16 PM
To: slug@nks.net
Subject: [SLUG] tape drive back-ups
Hello all!
Anybody have any experience backing up to tape with Linux?? Any drive
suggestions? I've been looking at a Sony AIT-2 drive ( SDX-520C ) as I can
get 50GB native / 130GB compressed per tape and I have a lot of data to back
up (hundreds of gigabytes). Sony says the drive is Linux compatible and 2
companies offer Linux software for it...though they charge an arm and a leg.
I was wondering how well the amanda suite works and any other suggestions as
I have never worked with tapes. I assume that archives larger than one
tape's capacity can span? Any advice and/or actual experience with tapes
and/or this drive/media type would be appreciated.
Thanks!!
Mike Branda Jr.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted
are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy
or position of NKS or any of its employees.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 19:25:13 EDT