From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Apr 5 9:12:38 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from Samizdat.uucom.com (samizdat.uucom.com [198.202.217.54]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8539B1548C for ; Mon, 5 Apr 1999 09:12:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cshenton@uucom.com) Received: (from cshenton@localhost) by Samizdat.uucom.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id MAA26383; Mon, 5 Apr 1999 12:10:22 -0400 (EDT) To: "Brian's Mail" Cc: "FreeBSD Questions" Subject: Re: Tape Backup References: From: Chris Shenton Date: 05 Apr 1999 12:10:21 -0400 In-Reply-To: "Brian's Mail"'s message of "Sun, 4 Apr 1999 14:00:24 -0500" Message-ID: Lines: 30 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.6.45/Emacs 20.3 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, 4 Apr 1999 14:00:24 -0500, "Brian's Mail" said: Brian> Hello, Can anyone give me any tips on the best tape drives to Brian> get? I want a SCSI device, not floppy of IDE. Is there any Brian> support for the tape changers (HP SureStore 24x6 etc.)? 4mm DDS and 8mm Exabyte seem popular, but lots of folks here don't like the fact that they tend to flake out. I'm using 4mm DDS2 and the tapes seem to show errors after maybe a month of daily use. FreeBSD has the "chio" tape changer command. I use Amanda with my 4xDDS2 drive with Amanda's glue script calling chio; works very well. Amanda rocks for doing backups of your network, controlling bots, prioritizing systems:/filesystems and remembering where stuff is. As I said, my tapes tend to flake after Amanda cycles through them on its daily backup regiment. New tapes fix the problems, which is why I suspect the tapes. Might wanna look at the used, surplus, and auction houses for DDS or Exabyte drives -- that's where I found my changer for < $200. Saw a 10-tape Exabyte 8500 (5G) changer last weekend for $200, really wish I had bought it. I guess companies are dumping ('scuse the pun) their helical scan gear for DLTs, but I can't afford DLT for home yet, much less a DLT juke. I also have an HP TR-4 SCSI drive which is pretty fast and pretty affordable but media is around $30/tape which discourages me from having multiple dump level backups. :-( To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message