[CLUE-Tech] backup solution

[Michael Robbert]

Mike S.,
I'm not a tape expert by any means, so feel free to correct me, but I think 
that there are some incorrect facts here.
DDS3 tapes will hold 12Gb of data, the 24Gb is a manufaturer assumption of 2:1
compression ratio. If you're pushing compressable data to the drive and have it
setup to do hardware compression you may be getting 24Gb on each tape.
DDS4 tapes hold 20Gb and again advertise 40Gb with compression. I did some 
looking for a 120Gb drive and all I could find were autoloaders that hold 6
tapes and say 120Gb in their name or description.
If you want 120Gb per tape you'll want to look into DLT or LTO. I have an 8
tape DLT changer from Dell that works for me. I know other people here that
love their LTO drives. I found this review at Tom's hardware that should be 
good reading: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030225/

As for software, I swear by AMANDA. It is free which suited my needs well and
open which suited my tastes well. It is all command line based so there is a
learning curve, but once you have it setup there isn't much to it. It does all
the figuring of what kind of backup to do for each drive/partition each day so
you don't need to think about that at all. If you have very simple needs though
then I'm sure you could cook up a simple shell script to run tar or dump.

Good Luck,
Mike Robbert

* Mike Staver <staver at fimble.com> [03/15/04 17:45]:
> Can anybody suggest a good backup solution? I'm looking for a good combo 
> of hardware and software.  Right now, my company currently has a DDS3 
> autoloader tape drive that can hold up to 24 gig per tape.  It holds 7 
> tapes.  So, we're getting very cramped for space on that considering our 
> mail server alone takes up 8.5 gig of that nightly.  I had been looking 
> at a DDS4 tape drive that holds up to 120 gig per tape - and that may be 
> what we go with.  I'm not sure though if that's a good idea - and if we 
> did, are there some nice open source packages out there to work with it? 
>  I currently use Veritas 8.6, but it's aging fast.
> -- 
> 
>                                 -Mike Staver
>                                  staver at fimble.com
>                                  mstaver at globaltaxnetwork.com
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