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Tape Backups for Personal Use, Using Linux?
demaria asks: "As hard drives continue to grow, it's getting more difficult to back up important and not-as-important data. I run a small personal system (about 20 friends - not commercial) and have about 20gigs of data that I'd like to protect in case of disk crash, accidential deletions, or other forms of evil. I'm looking for people's experiences and problems with various personal backup systems under Linux. I can deal with downtime and changing tapes (such as using a 4G native tape). I'd consider CD-R except that I'd need about 30 of them, and I don't find them terribly reliable to begin with. Tape seems to be the cheapest medium. I'm only looking to do backups once every month or two, and only looking to spend about $200 on a drive (SCSI or IDE is fine, as is buying a used one), and no more than $50 on tapes per backup set. Can anyone recommend a good drive that'll work fine under Linux, and good backup software ? (if there's something better than tar -cf of course!)" After just losing a 30G HD due to a power supply surge, I too am in the market for such a solution. (And yes, I am kicking myself for not making backups, fortunately it was nothing critical...just Windows)
I would stay as far as you can from onstream drives, as they went bust, you will be able to get their drives used. How ever their drives are really bad, worse then a Cd-r could ever be.
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