Backup System

dspeer

Anyone know a good tape backup drive that will work with RH 8.0?

stolzyboy

you can find a whole pile of them if you go to seagate.com

then look under products and search

BeastRider

Another possible alternative: Tape backup devices can be expensive, the media aint cheap, you might have to use multiple tapes, and if you blow track 0, rebuilding a disk can be a major hassle.

Have you considered an ATA hardware RAID device? You can get them in RAID 0, 1, and 5. In 0, you get two identical disks. In 5 you get true parity striping and better overall usage of disk space.

Disks are cheap and most of the hardware RAID offerings have on the fly rebuild if you have to put a new disk in.

The only thing I see tape being good for these days is archiving, and a CD RW does a decent job for specific archive jobs.

My $0.02.

PS: If offsite storage is a cocern, get a swappable drive cage to go with the ATA.

dspeer

I use a 6-drive SCSI Ultra 320 RAID 5 setup (speed is important to my apps) so I know I have the parity and striping. What I need, though, is a solution in case of loss of data not related to disk failures. I would like something, not necessarily a tape drive, that I could do a plug in and dump a couple of times a day. An external hard drive would work fine, even, but I would like something recognized easily by Red Hat 8.0 and not something requiring other software. I don't want any new apps running on my boxes.

Sxooter

I've found good deals at online auctions. I picked up a 2/4 gig drive a few years ago I still use at home.

If you need something bigger, the DLT drives and AIT drives are the big mommas. They go for $500 or more used, but have capacities of 50 Gig or more per tape.

Under those are the exabyte VXA packet oriented drives which are kinda slow, but do 33 gigs native, and are designed to be readable even after catastrophies like dropping a tape in the toilet etc...

The used 8mm exabytes aren't a bad deal, and hold 7 to 20 gigs native, if I remember.

Then you're down to the 4mm drives which run 2/4/12 gigs native (DDS 1/2/3 respectively) I've used the 12 gigs, and while the drive failure rate was higher than I'd like, the drives worked well when they were actually running. That was when they first came out, so it's likely they're much more reliable now.

I use an exabyte 8mm 7Gig drive and it's quite nice and easy to use with linux (mt and tar are all I need)