Tapes are good if you know what they are doing. Must keep the heads
clean. Cannot expect to take a tape made in one and read it in another
(most of the time works but sometimes it doesnt). You have to have a
schedule of testing the tapes. Something like once a week restore a
random file and once a month restore a whole partition (if you have the
space). At least this way the surprises are minimized.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Civileme [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 1:47 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [expert] ORB Drive
>
>
> John Aldrich wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, you wrote:
> > > John,
> > >
> > > OnStream only produce tape drives - I hate tape drives . .
> > >
> > Understood.. but at this point, it would appear that it's
> > the only "multi-gig" removeable media drive available for
> > Linux users.
> > John
>
> Ummmm
>
> How about an IDE HDD in a drawer? I use two of them and leapfrog and
> backup is down to single user for maintenance and the copy
> command. The
> backup (20 Gb worth) takes less time than my UPS is able to stay up.
>
> That's multi-gig and (kinda) removable. After a MAC
> WorkGroup Server 80
> crashed in 1996 here and ALL of its QIC cartridges proved
> unrecoverable
> AND everyone lost 6 years work, people in this location are
> allergic to
> the mention of the word "tape".
>
> I have a Python program that takes the big disk and transfers all its
> files to CD-R on an off-line machine once a week. I'm not
> sure I could
> rebuild a bootable without reinstalling, but I know I can restore all
> the data files. No fancy compression schemes or anything
> like that. It
> can take a 2 G file (or even larger if such were supported) and spread
> it across several CD-Rs. I leave space on some of them, and may not
> make the most efficient use of CD-R space, but at $.90 each,
> it is more
> important to save labor and data than it is to maximize use
> of space on
> CD-Rs. The proggie also prints out a catalog of what is on each disk
> and a set of labels on plain old Avery 5160s. Not fancy but it works.
>
> But it is not "removable media" because it is the entire HDD that is
> removed, not just the media. Still 20 G on a HDD is a lot easier to
> handle than 10 JAZ cartridges which incidentally cost three times the
> price of the 20G HDD. And, of course, it is fun to try to
> make JAZ and
> its 2G really work well with Linux.
>
> Hope this is useful to someone else.
>
> Civileme
>
>
