Well, depending on your needs... Since you are replacing a single tape drive, I assume that your backup requirements are 4 tapes or less. @ ~10Gb per tape (you have an older drive I assume), thats 40Gb.
A new tape drive (HP or some "good brand", its backup afterall, who wants el-cheapo right?), DAT, DDS3, single tape, is about $800. That will give you 40Gb on one tape (with compression). DLT, well, is a fair bit more, like +$1000, for a single tape unit. Autoloaders? Well, just add 2-10K more in price.(depending on library size) for both DAT and DLT, and I wont even get into Ultrium. OR Grab older p2 or better box. Put in a raid card. Make your own local co-lo. Ide disk is cheap, bandwidth is cheap. A disk fails (assuming you mirrored and striped), shutdown, replace, boot, (insert your rebuild task here, depending on software or hardware raid), done. Better yet, find a used, or currently unused "real" server, with scsi hot swap. And be done with ide raid. DVD might be nice, but /. did a poll on this, and here are the results ->http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/17/1040246&mode=thread&tid=137 I agree with many of the points included, like disc readability in other drives, and low software support. I use HP OmniBack, and the agents run on many platforms (HP-UX, WinNT/2K, Linux, Solaris are the ones I use). And they all are capable of streaming across the wire to the locally attached archive unit. Of course this means getting a premium cost archive unit from HP, and licensing your various platforms. HP's licensing is FAR better than Microsofts, so I will recommend them anytime. My two cents... Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Ian Bruseker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2002 10:14 am Subject: (clug-talk) Looking for backup hardware/software suggestions > I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions on good backup > hardware/softwaresolutions. I'm looking to replace a 4/8 GB tape > drive on a Linux server. > Currently I use that drive with the hostdump.sh script (forget > where I got > it, but I'm sure I'm not the only one familiar with it). > > I want to replace it with something that a) works (the drive is a > bit old > and just not really working right anymore) and b) can back up multiple > machines/platforms. I have some legacy Windows boxes that have > importantstuff on them too, and I want to pull in data from them > to the Linux box and > dump it all from there to a backup. > > For software, I have done some looking at Amanda and BRU. I also > checkedout Veritas (because it was bundled with one of the drives > I looked at), but > it seems to be Windows-only from what I could tell, and that is > not the > right solution. Thing is, I've never used either Amanda or BRU > (and BRU's > Windows 2000/XP client is in beta, according to their web site, which > normally wouldn't bother me, but when backing up important data, > it _has_ to > work). Anyone have any experience? > > For hardware, like I said, it's currently a tape drive, and > replacing it > with another tape drive isn't a problem, though they are getting > harder to > find. I had one person suggest I look at DVD instead of tape, > which isn't a > bad idea, but I don't know how Amanda or BRU would play with that > (also I > think his real motivation was that he had DVD to sell and no tape, and > really didn't understand that tape isn't nearly as dead in the > corporateworld as his little retail brain thinks it is - his > employer shall remain > nameless other than to say it was not Staples, just so no one > thinks I'm > slamming Cameron. ;-) ). Does anyone have experience using DVD > as a > backup medium? Or maybe a store that has experience and knowledge in > corporate backup solutions, and who understand the people really > do still > use tape drives? > > Thanks in advance for any suggestions. > > Ian > >
