So, the local sysadmin has finally decided to put into operation a
DLT4700 robot that had been purchased a couple of years ago. I've
managed to convince them to buy a backup tape drive, in case the robot
fails. However, they can't seem to find any DLT4000 tape drives for
sale any more, they're considering purchasing a DLT7000 drive, in the
hopes that:
(i) in case the DLT4000 robot fails, the DLT7000 tape drive will be
able to read backups done with it, and
(ii) after the DLT4000 robot is fixed, it will be able to read tapes
written by the DLT7000 drive.
Since they're total newbies with this DLT stuff (and so am I, mind you
;-), I thought I'd ask here for advice. We don't even know whether
there's any newer kind of DLT tape we should avoid because our old
tape unit wouldn't be able to cope with it (and I wouldn't trust a
local reseller would warn us about that :-), and/or if we should take
any special measures when writing to old-fashioned DLT tapes on the
newer drive so as to make sure they will be readable by the older
drive. We'll probably stick to 20GB (native, 40GB with compression)
tapes, since we've already got some of those.
Thanks in advance for any advice,
--
Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me
