[geeks] Dying DAT72 drive?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Mark <md.benson at gmail.com>
>Date: 2008/07/22 Tue PM 04:32:00 EDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: [geeks] Dying DAT72 drive?

<snip>

>Any advices are welcome, do we need a new drive here?

I'd say so - but that is based on what you say, and my near-ignorance of those drives ;^)

Seriously, if you start to question your backup tape drive, I think you need to replace it right away...

>Are USB2.0 ones any good? I don't fancy swapping over an internal one,  
>it'd mean having the server out for over an hour and I don't want  
>that. USB 2.0 would be hot-plug and at worst a reboot cycle, right?

Your current drive is SCSI, doesn't the server have an external SCSI port you could hang a new drive off of?

Also, an hour of downtime (again, speaking from ignorance) doesn't *seem* that bad, esp. if you wind up with good backups going forward.

I think having the tape drive internal to the server your backing up (as opposed to local) is only good in smaller, non-critical applications (SOHO/SMB-class applications), if downtime is that big a problem, I'd suggest considering a dedicated backup machine to pull data over the network, so that when the tape drives fail, the only machine impacted is the backup machine...

HTH,

Lionel