A few weeks ago, I decided to get serious about performing system
backups. So, instead of juggling around thousands of floppies, or
dozens of zip disks in order to back up my 4 GB drive, I decided to
invest in a Ditto drive. So, I went to Circuit City and snatched up
their last 2GB Iomega parallel port drive, thinking that getting it to
work would be a snap. I mean, all I had to do was plug it into my
parallel port, recompile my kernel, plug it into a wall outlet, and
start making backups. Right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. :) I spent
several hours searching the web and asking around on IRC for advice,
but several weeks later I am still as clueless as I was on day
one. So, I'll ask here, and see if I can get better results.
First of all, has anyone here gotten this drive to work under Linux?
Hours of web searching has pretty much dashed most of my hopes. I've
checked the ftape-howto, but noticed that the version which I have is
a year or so out of date, and states that the parallel drives use a
propriatory format. Yet, searches of mailing list archives seem to
indicate that as of 1997, the ftape driver had experimental support
for this drive.
I then snagged the 2.1.xx kernel release. At the time this was
2.1.121, not sure if that is still the latest. I had several problems
compiling this source, and gave up. Is the Ditto parallel drive
supported any better in 2.1.121 than it is n 2.0.35? If so, I'll
concentrate my efforts on getting a clean 2.1.121 compile, instead of
searching the web for assistance.
Finally, and I hope this isn't the case, can anyone recommend a good
high-capacity backup solution, in case I need to return this? Also,
how compatible are tape cartridges between drives? I have 2 2GB tapes
for this drive, and would like to keep them if possible, since the
boxes are basically scrap cardboard now, and I'm not sure where the
receipt is anymore. :)
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
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