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