Fred Frigerio wrote:
> Tapes are good if you know what they are doing. Must keep the heads
> clean. Cannot expect to take a tape made in one and read it in another
> (most of the time works but sometimes it doesnt). You have to have a
> schedule of testing the tapes. Something like once a week restore a
> random file and once a month restore a whole partition (if you have the
> space). At least this way the surprises are minimized.
Yeppers, I wasn't the sysadmin at the time, but some schedule of testing
was done. The tape drive was what crashed the machine, and it did so with
the spectacular results one would expect from a 1000W switching UPS
(spitting hot metal which KOed the disk). No other tape drives would read
it, and I believe a data recovery service made $1000 evaluating 5 tapes (at
$200 per tape) to report that nothing was recoverable. The WorkGroupServer
Motherboard and case and floppy were reused, but not as a WGS. The HDD,
the tape drive, the power supply and the cabling had to be trashed.
And you are exactly right, no other tape drive would read the tapes.
Civileme
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Civileme [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 1:47 PM
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: [expert] ORB Drive
> >
> >
> > 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
> >
> >
