Source for refurbished Tape Drives or Drive Repair

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

> I'm setting up a backup server using rsnapshot to do rsync backups
> over ssh. The plan is to backup all systems to the central backup
> server each night, and then back the server up to tape.

This comment made me realize that I had omitted an important detail of my
setup:  in order to get a full 3 month rotation out of two dozen tapes, I had
to set up Amanda to put daily incrementals onto the central backup server's
hard drive.  These are then dumped to tape once a week, along with level-0
(full) backups of key filesystems.  Only once a month do I perform level-0's
of everything.

To do that I came up with the following two hacks:  in a weekly cron script, I
disable write access to the tape device every day except for one day of the
week.  In a monthly script, I swap between two Amanda config files, with a
different "runtapes" parameter and longer "dumpcycle" parameters for the
less-frequently updated filesystems in my disklist.  Net result is I use one
tape per week, except the first week of the month when 4 tapes are required.

The alternative way to do this, as per the Amanda documentation, is to set up
a separate configuration to run "archive" dumps once in a while to a separate
set of tapes.  But my hacks include such archives (I'm talking big
less-changing items like a hundred gigs of pictures, music and videos)
automatically in the rotation so I always have at least 3 full dumps of
everything (plus incrementals between) without having to remember to swap
between different sets of tapes.

If you run through a tape every single night then yeah, the tape reliability
issue would come up a lot more often.  Reducing tape wear was among my top
reasons for making these tweaks.  My next tweak will address an increasing
problem:  it now takes too long for my backups to complete; I need to run 2
tapes in parallel, get faster equipment, or throttle I/O so it doesn't swamp
my file server during backups.

I'll answer the Subject line once again:  eBay is the leading source for used
tape equipment and media, that I've found.

-rich


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