One of the biggest rules of tape backups is to choose a drive that will be well-supported in the future. Consider this: you buy a clearance tape drive, and 100 brand-new blank tapes. One month after you buy your drive, the rest of them disappear from the market. You do perfectly great backups for two years, never a problem. Then, one day your machine takes a lightning hit, frying your hard drive(s) as well as your tape drive. You've got two years worth of tapes, and no drive to put them in. You can't go to the store and buy a compatible drive to put them in, since it was based on proprietary standards. Now, you've gotta search ebay and newsgroups for someone with the same drive.
Be careful buying any proprietary tape drive, especially an end-of-life one. DATs and DLTs are much more open standards, and you'll be able to buy a drive that supports them for many years to come. -Tim On Tue, 2001-10-30 at 14:42, Chopin Cusachs wrote: > > See that the Ditto Max 10 GB tape drives are cheap at a couple > of clearance places. See also that Office Depot is clearing out > the tapes. > > Still think it would be worth the cost to get one and a few tapes -- > can get a whole main partition on one. Wonder if there is software > for Linux that recognizes this drive. Iomega sold it to Tecmar, > which is discontinuing it, but a couple of outfits are making the > tape cartridges. While the software that comes with the drive > is only for Win9X, Veritas offers a cheap upgrade path to their > single computer backup software, and lists the drive on the > supported tape drive list, through Stomp. > > Stomp might well be a Linux program in disguise. > > See also notice of a new kernel out. Anybody tried it? > > I'll be out of town Friday through Sunday night. Trust there will > be a November meeting...... > > Choppy > > > ================================================ > BRLUG - The Baton Rouge Linux User Group > Visit http://www.brlug.net for more information. > Send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to change > your subscription information. > ================================================ ================================================ BRLUG - The Baton Rouge Linux User Group Visit http://www.brlug.net for more information. Send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to change your subscription information. ================================================
