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Oommen Thomas wrote: > > Hi, > > Do any of you have experience in using SCSI tape drives on Linux? > > a) What additional hardware is needed for the tape drive to work, if the > kernel has SCSI support and has SCSI devices already connected? > b) How do you go about installing/configuring the drive, assuming we have > the 'insmod st' done? > c) Are tar/taper the only software needed/available for backup/recovery > with tapes on Linux ? > d) How is the reliability vis-a-vis on Windows ? > e) Any tips on compatibility (RHL hardware compatibility list just says > "most scsi tape drives" supported)? I have a Sony PCBacker external DDS-4 drive (20/40GB). RH6.1. I just run a tar script w/ cron. Simple and non-proprietary. Very reliable so far (about a year old). Arkeia and BRU are a couple of commercial alternatives. I just plugged in in and refer to it via /dev/st0. No pain, no brain. Just make sure you have kernel support. I'd guess reliability would have more to do w/ the drive manufacturer than the OS. I also have an HP external DDS-3 on Netware. HP has had to replace it twice within the past couple of years (under warrantee, fortunately). The DDS-3 replaced an HP DDS-2 that burned out. Just my experience, for what it's worth. Here's my simple stupid backup script. Don't forget the --atime-preserve, otherwise you won't be able to find those old stale files that sit untouched for years at a time. You only have to forget once, then you'll be kicking yourself. Argggh. cd / # don't redirect error to log file. will be mailed to root by crond tar --atime-preserve \ --create \ --verbose \ --verbose \ --label="$HOSTNAME:`date +%Y-%m-%d`" \ --file=/dev/st0 \ home3/wfdg/shared \ home3/wfdg/web \ usr/local/pgsql/data \ 1>/var/log/backup/backup.log I'm trying to put together a PostgreSQL application in my spare time that will suck up the backup.log file each night. Then link to some web forms via PHP, so users can find files and I just need to pop in the tape. SQL doesn't support variable depth hierarchical data structures well, though. Sort of an excercise in SQL masochism, I suppose. For now, when people need something back, we just guess the date, I list the tape to a file, and see if we find what we need. -- Ron Peterson Systems Manager Wallace Floyd Design Group 273 Summer Street Boston, MA 02210 617.350.7400 tel 617.350.0051 fax rpeterson at wallacefloyd.com - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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