[CentOS] Tape drive recommendations

Mark Schoonover schoon at amgt.com
Wed Mar 28 22:07:28 UTC 2007


John R Pierce wrote:
> Aron.Darling at Emulex.Com wrote:
>> Loader are totally a love/hate relationship.  They do make life a lot
>> easier as they do the tape movements for you which can be a tedious
>> thing at times.  With a loader or library you can script the entire
>> operation with tar, MTX and MT and let cron do all the work for you.
>> Always look for the OEM rather than buying the name brand equipment,
>> they are most always the same HW and FW with a different model
>> number in it.
> 
> 
> otoh, its hard to beat a 3 year warranty and on location support from
> the same vendor as your server hardware, assuming your a brand name
> shop in the first place....  hugely reduces finger pointing when
> there's a complex issue to resolve.   with OEM hardware bought on the
> whitebox market, you're often faced with replace or self-repair
> option at cost. 
> 

Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with AIT2
tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. I went with good old
rsync, and built up a 4 TB system to handle backups. Once configured, it's
nearly a 100% hands off solution. You can read about what I've done here:
http://marks-tech-pages.blogspot.com Works great especially for TBs of data
that needs to be backed up every day.

HTH

Mark Schoonover
IS Manager 
American Geotechnical - California, Nevada and Arizona 
V-> 858.450.4040 F-> 714.685.3909 C-> 858.472.3816
"Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end." -- Stephen
Hawking





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