John Aldrich wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Nov 1999, you wrote:
> > John,
> >
> > OnStream only produce tape drives - I hate tape drives . .
> >
> Understood.. but at this point, it would appear that it's
> the only "multi-gig" removeable media drive available for
> Linux users.
> John
Ummmm
How about an IDE HDD in a drawer? I use two of them and leapfrog and
backup is down to single user for maintenance and the copy command. The
backup (20 Gb worth) takes less time than my UPS is able to stay up.
That's multi-gig and (kinda) removable. After a MAC WorkGroup Server 80
crashed in 1996 here and ALL of its QIC cartridges proved unrecoverable
AND everyone lost 6 years work, people in this location are allergic to
the mention of the word "tape".
I have a Python program that takes the big disk and transfers all its
files to CD-R on an off-line machine once a week. I'm not sure I could
rebuild a bootable without reinstalling, but I know I can restore all
the data files. No fancy compression schemes or anything like that. It
can take a 2 G file (or even larger if such were supported) and spread
it across several CD-Rs. I leave space on some of them, and may not
make the most efficient use of CD-R space, but at $.90 each, it is more
important to save labor and data than it is to maximize use of space on
CD-Rs. The proggie also prints out a catalog of what is on each disk
and a set of labels on plain old Avery 5160s. Not fancy but it works.
But it is not "removable media" because it is the entire HDD that is
removed, not just the media. Still 20 G on a HDD is a lot easier to
handle than 10 JAZ cartridges which incidentally cost three times the
price of the 20G HDD. And, of course, it is fun to try to make JAZ and
its 2G really work well with Linux.
Hope this is useful to someone else.
Civileme
