Source for refurbished Tape Drives or Drive Repair

[jbk at mail2.gis.net (jbk)]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
> On 3/18/07, jbk <jbk at mail2.gis.net> wrote:
>> I had a tape drive fail this week. It happened right before
>> a kernel update on my machine that caused me to erroneously
>> file a bug with redhat. I have been following the discussion
>> on backup strategies on this forum and fedoraforum and I've
>> decided that for me backing up to tape is still the best
>> option. I currently have a travan 4 drive and I could move
> 
> I am interested in why you have decided to stick with tape.  

I believe it is because the werr of the deck at 3 in the 
morning is reassuring to me.

I have
> read research papers that claim tapes fail nearly 100% of the time
> given some pretty common constraints (time, backup method, rotation,
> etc).  IIRC, this biggest factor was the high probability of failed
> restoration from a backup tape. 

Yes tapes will eventually fail, and after the point at which 
they fail 100% of the data is lost. But in my experience 
here at home and at the office is that every time I have 
sought out data to be restored it has been there. Now I have 
never attempted to restore a system after a catastrophic 
failure, but I have never had one. I've had cpu's die, hard 
drives get flaky, but nothing where I couldn't retrieve the 
data that I wanted. Since I run Fedora on my server I 
rebuild the system every six months, but I am systematic at 
it as I have two partitions reserved for the OS that I 
rotate between editions. So the tape backup is just another 
element in helping me rotate between temporary data 
inaccessibility. Over the month it makes several copies of 
the same data, very little of which changes much in that 
time period. Large chunks of similar data like pictures I 
copy to cd or dvd media so it can be cataloged together.
  In the end, it should be cheaper to
> backup to disk, right?  And if it is a USB/Firewire removable drive,
> you can still store it in a vault between backups.  I'm just really
> interested in how you came to the conclusion that tape is still the
> best method for you :-)
I would need four firewire devices to have separate 
redundant copies and that would be twice as expensive as a 
travan drive and a half dozen tapes. It would be safer 
though because you would have 4 separate drives in the event 
one failed, that you could plug in and be up and running.
Distributing multiple backups amongst multiple computers 
would require more computers than the two plus laptop I 
have. Setting up a simple backup scheme to distribute backup 
data amongst these may take me longer than the two or three 
days shipping it will take to order a new tape drive. I only 
have nights and weekends to dabble in computers, and most 
nights I'm too tired. Now that the weather is warming 
boating season is starting and I will be out on the rivers 
West of here and I just won't have enough time.
I know the limitations of my backup scheme and that is it's 
best feature.

Jim K-R

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