Tape backup for Linux 7.3 / 9.0 Recomendation

[Michael Scully]

Tom:

	I have always stuck with DDS tape drives on SCSI.  You can get
cheaper tape drives like Travan units, but the media costs are higher.  You
can still get DDS4 drives (what would be DDS5 is called DAT-72 because of
Sony's refusal to license the name) for $600-700 from various sources, but
the media is under $10.  When you figure that you'll need 20-30 tapes for a
decent layering of backups, at least for my application (accounting), the
total cost is usually right in line with the cheaper Travan drives.

	I always sell these units with backup and recovery software from
Lone-Tar.  I'm using these in commercial environments where I need quick
recovery when the disk subsystems crap out.  They've been around for years
in the Unix world.

	Keep in mind optical storage and what's ahead on the horizon.
There's a dogfight going on with high definition DVD formats, but I'm hoping
Sony's Blu-Ray will triumph.  I sat in on the press conference for the
Blu-Ray consortium at CES a few weeks ago.  Vendors are ready to ship 50 GB
(uncompressed) re-writable drives by the 4th quarter this year, and Sony has
working prototypes of 8-layer 200 GB units in the lab now.  With the huge
volumes to be cranked out for desktop PC's, pricing is expected in the $200
range.  Add some compression software and you've got massive backup
capability for very little money and low media costs.

Scully



Tom Klem wrote:
> Hi gang,
> 
> Does anyone here have a recommendation for a particular brand in a tape
backup unit that would run either off an AHA2940x or the EIDE extensions
provided by Promise TX100/2?
> 
> I'm wondering what works with native Linux here, as in using the tape
backup as a device to do data dumps to as in backup and restore commands
already found with Linux.
> 
> Thank you,
> Tom Klem