I've just set up a 4G DAT drive on a powermac, using it to back up a
FreeBSD PC running netatalk. So far it seems to be working just fine,
however it's really slow. Retrospect reports 3.2M/minute (just under
55Kbytes/sec), which is pretty abysmal. Not surprisingly the tape isn't
streaming.
What kind of tricks are folks using to get better performance out of this
setup? I guess you could backup to a local hard drive first and then
write that to tape. Amanda (unix backup software) can write all data to a
holding disk before writing it to tape, but Retrospect doesn't seem to
have this feature. I haven't had much need to look at Appletalk/Netatalk
performance tuning until now, if someone has pointers they'd be much
appreciated.
- Mike
