[NTLUG:Discuss] Tape Drive Recommendation

[Chris Cox]

Preston wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have always used DDS4 tape drives in the past with good success and 
> was wondering if anyone had any experiences, good or bad, with any other 
> tape formats.  Speed does not matter that much (the backups will be run 
> in the middle of the night by a cron job), but cost and reliability are 
> important factors.  20GB is enough space for now (current backups are 
> only ~5 GB with bz2 compression) and should be for a while, but bigger 
> is always better ;)  One reason I have always stuck with DDS tape drives 
> in the past is that the protocol has been around for a long time and 
> therefore tapes, drivers, etc. are easy to find.   I don't want to get 
> stuck with a tape standard that is dropped in a year or two and be 
> unable to find tapes.
> Thanks for your help.

We run LTO at the office now.  We use a home grown Linux based
system we developed.  It uses rsync with the clients to a large
4TB disk cache (daily snapshots) and weekly archival to an
LTO library.  We use mtx ... the rest is just normal SCSI
tape stuff.

At home I like OnStream... but they went belly-up (sad).
I have an extra OnStream 50G ADR internal SCSI unit
sitting around right now.... but you might not be interested
since the technology is essentially dead.  Good performance
for a cheap price though.  I'll have the 120G version with
my machine at the Linux Fair.