Topic: Exabyte Model EXB-8505 Tape backup unit

[Craig Bursey]

Hi Folks,

Just wondering if anyone has an Exabyte, EXB-8505 Tape backup unit working. This in an older unit, circa.1995. It's in a Dell PowerEdge 6100/200 server.

The system appears to identify it fine and I get no errors. I've been doing some testing with the flexbackup program and I'm getting some errors...

1.) Flexbackup -toc  | gives an error saying no index found.

2.) Flexbackup -toc all  | works and shows me three indexes

3.) Flexbackup -restore  |  This is a copy of the flexbackup.extract.log file.

|------------------------------------------------
| Reading from current tape position
|------------------------------------------------
At block 0.
|------------------------------------------------
| buffer -m 3m -s 10k -u 100 -t -p 75 -B -i /dev/nst0 | gzip -dq | restore -x \
|  -o -v -b 10 -f -
|------------------------------------------------
buffer (reader): failed to read input: Cannot allocate memory

gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file
restore: Tape is not a dump tape
Verify tape and initialize maps
End-of-tape encountered
|------------------------------------------------
At block 1.
|------------------------------------------------


Did I mention that I'm no Flexbackup expert?

Thanks for any help you can provide,

Craig

[Kees Blokland]

Just my 2 cents..

I tried a similar drive last week.

1st thing to realize is that the tapes are only 1.5-4 Meg (depending on the tapes). I had 1.5 meg tapes.

Taper is not made for multiple-tapes. ( unless I did not spot the obvious..)

I  used Arkeia to run a full backup, just to see how things go.
I managed 1Gig/hour on average. So on a large box, start counting your hours.

I would not recommend it for 'outside' use. If you have the time, and it is for home use only, no problem!

When your data does not fit on a single tape, then have a look at Arkeia.

Other then this, it worked fine.

kees