On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 07:55:52AM +0200, Pouya Tafti wrote: > > - is using an LTO drive for manual backups (or backups at this tiny scale) a > fundamentally dumb idea? >
My view is, no, it is not a dumb idea. People keep saying tape is dead but it keeps going. It is simple, robust and pretty reliable. > - how well-supported and widely-used are they on NetBSD (wrt both kernel > devices and userland tools)? > I have used both LTO 2 and LTO 4 with SCSI interfaces on NetBSD, they work fine (though I hit a multi-tape bug recently but that has been fixed) > - are there reliable strategies to split a larger ZFS volume across several > smaller cartridges (LTFS seems not to support splits)? > Unsure about splitting a zfs volume backup across tapes... > - are there specific caveats to watch out for (e.g. if used drives are to be > avoided, or would end up being cost blackholes necessitating further > equipment, obsolete media, etc.)? > Not really, just make sure you get a tape drive with a usable interfce, I recall seeing a lot of very cheap fibre channel drives when I looked, they could be problematic because you need a FC hba and fibre to make them go and I don't think NetBSD has any FC drivers. All my drives are the old style paralell scsi, of course, you need a scsi card for those. I am not 100% certain but I expect the SAS drives would work fine too. -- Brett Lymn -- Sent from my NetBSD device. "We are were wolves", "You mean werewolves?", "No we were wolves, now we are something else entirely", "Oh"
