I'm getting ready to buy a tape drive to do backups for a
small business. Machines on the network (most of them W98) will be
backed up over the network by a Linux box using a SCSI tape drive.
The network only has about 70GB of disk total. My thought is to
occasionally do full backups, and regularaly do incrementals from
the last full backup. If the network grows significantly (probably
not, I think that we're going to let our ISP host our web site, or
at least co-locate), I'll re-think.
My current thought is to use one of the Seagate or Tecmar
Travan internal SCSI offerings. DAT and DLT seem amazingly more
expensive, at least up front.
1. Would someone care to pontificate about the relative
advantages of DAT and DLT versus Travan, and whether they apply to my
scenario?
2. My poking around the web turns up "NS" versions of Travan.
Can anyone explain how or if that differes from just Travan? The
bundles are confusing, so I'm not sure whether this costs more than,
say, just TR5 drives (and I guess cartridges?). If so, is it worth
it?
3. For a bunch more money, the drives claim to do ALDC
(adaptive loseless data compression) in hardware. Is this just asking
for archival tapes to be useless because the compression technology
will move on and a few years down the road the replacement for a
failed drive will be able to read the physical media but not undo that
compression? (I guess there's always reading the media raw and
de-compressing in software, if the stuff is well enough specified.)
4. The ALDC drives also seem to offer what I'd call read
behind verification. In the experience of the sysadmins out there,
is this a desireable feature?
5. Are features like ALDC and read behind likely to be
controlled by vendor specific SCSI commands that aren't going to be
supported under linux without doing my own backup utility coding, or
even driver coding? (It might be fun, but it's not clear that it
would ever reach the top of my stack.)
TIA
Bill
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