Re: tape drives
Hello, On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 11:44:54AM +0100, mick crane wrote: > Do people use tape drives for backup ? Only in places that need vast amounts of data stored for a very long time with restores being rare. Restoration is slow with tapes. Even a low end LTO drive will set you back thousands of £/$/€. Most consumers and even most businesses will find it more cost effective and flexible to backup to HDDs and storage clouds. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Re: tape drives
On 2020-08-12 11:58, Dan Ritter wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open should be helpful to you. cheers mick -- Key ID4BFEBB31
Re: tape drives
The Wanderer wrote: > However, while I've considered using tapes for backup in my own private > environment, last time I looked the cheapest tape drive with support for > tapes large enough to be reasonable for my hard-drive capacities was > $3000 - and that's just the drive, not the tapes. That rivals - and may > surpass - the build-from-parts cost of my entire computer, which is > already nearly half storage by dollars spent. > > It's possible things have changed since then, but I'd be surprised if > tape drives were economical enough to be practical in a non-commercial > environment. New tape drives are expensive because they are only sold to businesses; used tape drives are cheap because no business wants to buy them. That said, even a new tape drive is a finicky beast compared to a spinning disk; anyone operating them should really have a spare drive, tested, sitting around and waiting for the primary one to fail. -dsr-
Re: tape drives
mick crane wrote: > Do people use tape drives for backup ? > I saved data to tape before but I think they were DAT and not very big but > see that these LTO-2 tapes are 600Gb and not expensive. > Do people use those ? Yes. However, my company has switched over to using disk storage for backups. The time-cost for retrieving a file or a directory is much lower, and we do that small recovery much more often than we need to bring back an entire machine. Also note that LTO-2 is 200GB per tape, not 600. Tape manufacturers have an awful habit of pretending that all data is compressible, and citing a compressed storage amount instead of the raw storage amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open should be helpful to you. -dsr-
Re: tape drives
On 2020-08-12 at 06:44, mick crane wrote: > Do people use tape drives for backup ? > I saved data to tape before but I think they were DAT and not very big > but see that these LTO-2 tapes are 600Gb and not expensive. > Do people use those ? Depends on the context you're talking about. I am given to understand that people do very much still use tape drives for backup in a server-room / data-center type of context. However, while I've considered using tapes for backup in my own private environment, last time I looked the cheapest tape drive with support for tapes large enough to be reasonable for my hard-drive capacities was $3000 - and that's just the drive, not the tapes. That rivals - and may surpass - the build-from-parts cost of my entire computer, which is already nearly half storage by dollars spent. It's possible things have changed since then, but I'd be surprised if tape drives were economical enough to be practical in a non-commercial environment. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Tape Drives?
On Tue, 14 Oct 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello everyone, Please forgive me for a question that has probably been asked thousands of times. I've just been so busy lately that I haven't been able to do the research I usually would. Does anyone have any recommendations on a tape drive that would be compatible with Linux? My problem is I want to install Linux, but first I need to format the drive. Before I can format the drive, I need to back up everything. Unfortunately I am just out of room for backing up things. I already have a zip drive, but it has gotten to the point where much of what I am backing up is things I would only really be using as backup archives, so that continuing to buy more and more zip disks doesn't seem appropriate (especially in the wallet). I also figured that since Linux is more sensitive to things like sudden outages, a tape drive would be a good thing to have. My other problem is how much I have to spend. Around $100 is what I'd like to go for. $150 is pushing it, but should be able to manage it. I had first also considered a CD-R, since I have musical interests, but those seems to be about $300 for the cheapest models. An Iomega Ditto seems to be about the right price, and I have heard good things about it. Unfortunately I've also heard that it can't be used with Linux yet. I did find one page with a guy that seemed to have nearly everything nailed down, and the page was marked April. Has any more progress been made? Or is there another tape drive that is compatible and about the same price? I suppose that if the Ditto still isn't compatible, but people believe it will be in something like 3 months, then that'd be fine, too. It'll be a little ways before most of my stuff gets transferred to Linux... The only Ditto which was a problem was the 2 GB version. I have a Ditto 3200 and it works fine with Linux (compiling ftape into the kernel). I understand that there is now support for the 2 GB Ditto (and Sony) drive, but you need to get a newer version of ftape and add it to the Linux kernel. Bob Bob Nielsen Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tucson, AZ AMPRnet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.primenet.com/~nielsen -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word unsubscribe to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
