Re: tape drives

[awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> For those of you running Linux servers: what kind of ***SCSI*** tape 
drives
> are you using? And what software do you use with it? I like the DDS3 
drives

I have 8mm, DLT, and DAT drives and they all just work. I think the 
DAT drives are now called DDS, anyway, they use 4mm tapes and hold 
something like 20/40Gb.

> under other OS's, but am wondering about Linux. I've not seen ARCServe 
or
> Backup Exec for Linux yet... I see that Dell and others have Linux 
servers
> ready to go, including drives. Dell has BE and ARCServe listed as the
> software available, but I doubt it exists. Also, drives are external.

I've tried several "commercial" backup programs and been so 
unimpressed I still use tar.  Our DB (Informix) has it's own backup 
software.  On a 13Gb filesystem to a DLT4000 drive, the best 
commercial package was 1 minute faster backing up than tar and took 
only a few minutes less to find a specific file a restore it,  so I'm 
a backup-software skeptic.

> If you aren't using tape drives, what do you use for offline backup?

Massive IDE drives are very cheap,  if you have a large filesystem you 
need to backup in short order it works pretty well to net-tar it to 
such a drive in another machine, at which point the filesystem cam be 
under heavy use again, while you back it up from that drive to the 
comparably slow tape drive.