[CentOS] Tape drive recommendations

[Les Mikesell]

Mark Schoonover wrote:
> 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.

If you want something that stores the backups much more efficiently 
(with a price in processing to do it), look at backuppc: 
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

It compresses everything and hardlinks all duplicates so you can keep 
about 10x what you'd expect online, and it has a nice web interface for 
browsing the backups and doing restores.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com