Backup Solutions

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 12:19:38PM -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:
> How much would you need to spend to get a "reliable" tape drive for backing 
> up data?
> 
> Quite a few years ago I had been using 4mm DAT tape drives that had a SCSI 
> interface. I had an HP 4mm DAT. It didn't last all that long (a year or 
> so?) before it died. The replacement drive also died after an even short 
> period of time but with a different failure. I was able to take the 
> mechanics from one drive and the electronics from the other to make a "new" 
> drive. It also died after a short while. The Toshiba 4mm DAT that was 
> purchased for backing up a couple of SGI computers also didn't seem to last 
> very long.
> 
> The two HP drives retailed for about $800 IIRC. The company I was working 
> for paid more than that for the Toshiba drive. None of the drives saw heavy 
> use. Backups only took one or two 2G tapes and were mainly used about once 
> a month. AFAIK, I never had a problem with the tapes. Just the drives. I no 
> longer trust a tape system for backups.

To be durable, avoid anything that uses helical scan heads.  So no DAT,
DDS, Exabyte, AIT, etc.  Helical scan causes much higher head wear and
tape wear (my experience in the past with HP DDS drives was about 10 to
15 uses of a tape and it was toast).

Linear tapy systems like DLT (and I believe LTO) are much much more
durable.

> More recently I was using DVD's for backups. The main issue has been trying 
> to find useable (or decent) Linux backup software that can use DVD's for 
> the external storage medium. The other issue is that the amount of data to 
> be backed up is starting to out pace the storage capacity of DVD's. At 
> first, two DVD's were enough but no longer.
> 
> My current machine has two drives configured as RAID1. I also just recently 
> picked up a removable harddrive for backups.
> 
> Someone suggested keeping a spare drive so that you can do restores later 
> on in case the drives are no longer available down the road. Since the 
> interface to the computer (SCSI, IDE, SATA, ...) can change over time and 
> older interfaces may become obsolete, it may be necessary to keep a spare 
> computer with the required interface around as well as the drive.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists