Topic: what tape drive?

[Del]

Hi All,
I would like to install a tape drive on my SME server (currently 5.6, but will eventually get upgraded to 6.0b3) are there any ones that work well with SME? Or maybe I should be asking are there any that I should avoid?
All comments welcome.
Regards,
Del

[SloopJohnB]

Look on ebay for the Travan TR5. I would use the IDE as it seems to be easier to setup, unless you already have a SCSI card setup.

I just bought a sealed Tape drive (TR5) for $90 and two new tapes for $50.

SloopJohnB

[Arron Arntzen]

Hi Del

I avoid tape drives like the plague. After 15+ years in IT recovering "data" off tape drives has earnt me lots of $$$'s and plenty of frustration.

Probs: If the unit fails, is stolen, burnt to rubble etc you then have to match the exact technology (model) before you can do anything. This may take weeks.

The tapes stretch, formats fail, go out of alignment etc etc etc. Manually realigning a new drive to match the old one is masochistic. This may take hours (15 in one stretch is my record off a "good brand" drive).

Every PC (virtually) has a cd/dvd these days. Recorders and blanks are cheap and often reusable. Use them!

Cheers


Arron

[Boris]

Arron,
you have an excelent point.
With prices on the IDE hard drives as they are today it may be valuable replacement fo Tapes as well if only changing them (hotswap) is available.
I wish autodetecting USB2/Fireware IDE enclosure is done easier and this would be great alternative.
2.5" enclosure is comparable by size and price to tapes today and much faster as well.

[k_graham]

I second that Aaron;

Also we don't put the DVD unit on the server, we put it in a workstation. Every night we were using winrar as a batch file to create 650 meg backups, now we have it create 4.5 gig compressed backups.  Even and Odd-day. Next day we write to removeable disk.  Winrar batch file can be set to not span the disk and to add 1 or 2% or whatever you desire extra redundency check in case of a bad sector. Ours automatically creates 1 1/2 volumes of 4.5 gig files or 11 CD's + 1 separate cd of critical accounting data.

Best part is that when restored file permissions are correctly restored  where as a direct copy to CD would have everything read only, & you get 2 or more times the capacity.

Restore works a treat. Select all the volumes in Winrar if its on the workstation and they all will restore to the new location needed, as I had to this summer.

I can post a sample batch file based on what we use at work if desired.

Ken

[boris]

k_graham,
Darrell May has the contrib called "backup2ws"  with server-manager panel that does excactly this. Uses rar to backup to workstation share and let you specify the volume size, folders to backup and schedule.

[Ken]

> Darrell May has the contrib called "backup2ws"  with
> server-manager panel that does excactly this. Uses rar to
> backup to workstation share and let you specify the volume
> size, folders to backup and schedule.

I downloaded the backup2ws files to a directory but am uncertain how to proceed. The manager shows and I told it to do a backup but I see this morning it did not happen.

I expect I don't have rar installed or properly installed on server. Anyone can tell me correct procedure for installation.

6.03 version of sme server

Ken

[boris]

Where is .rpm file for linux version or RAR in the same directory on myezserver.com
install like any other rpm with command
rpm -Uhv  *.rpm
verify from the command line that rar is installed by typing
rar
you  should see few pages of help on using it.

Word of caution: then using backup2ws it uses servers CPU (often slower then workstations) to do compresion, so it may be slow on big backups or old servers.