[geeks] Dying DAT72 drive?

[Phil Stracchino]

Mark wrote:
> I thought DLT drives were mega-bucks but actually they aren't any  
> more. I only need about 80GB of backup space, so a DLT 80/160 tape  
> would handle that no sweat.
> 
> Also, any brand recommendations?

FWIW, my experience is that LTO is more reliable than DLT and tends to
have a better price point.  Last place that I worked that used DLT for
backup had an entire pile of failed DLT drives and autochangers.

I like IBM LTO drives better than HP ones.  An LTO1 drive has 100GB
native capacity, and in my experience will hold about 130GB of
real-world data.


>> 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...
> 
> That's not a bad idea ("Of course it's a good idea!" - God (Monty  
> Python and the Holy Grail)). What concerns me is the addition of  
> another machine running 24/7. Would something like a PIII-900 handle  
> that kind of task sufficiently? I'd have thunk it ought to if it's  
> only piping network data to a tape drive...

Data point:  My backup server is my workstation, which is an Athlon
XP2400+.  Load from running a simultaneous full backup of all my
machines renders the desktop a little sluggish, but by no means
unusable.  The lion's share of that load is database I/O.  (I'm using
Bacula, BTW.)


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.