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Linux Backup With DVD Media?
Dan asks: "Our research group just moved into a new lab, and I am in charge of organizing the computer systems. A graduate student half-joked about finding a way to get the lab a DVD burner. At first I thought using DVD for backup would be cumbersome, but then I found a few products designed for backups. I targeted a DVDRAM Jukebox by Powerfile for $4000. While it appears to be a good solution for nightly backups, Powerfile does not support Linux. After searching for topics on Linux support for DVD backup systems, I found an unsupported script that was hacked together. There must be more support out there, right? Has anyone else had experience with using DVD as an automated backup system? It wouldn't be such a good idea to spend $4000 on hardware we couldn't guarantee to work, but it would be sweet to have a jukebox DVD burner running on Linux."
You have to worry about the actually technology (dvd-rw vs. dvd+rw etc.) and also the filesystem you use.
Along w/ a few different minor/major revisions of UDF that are out there, compatible 'versions' on different OS's can fail to work mysteriously. I had trouble over the summer w/ OS2 and using the 'newer' mkudffs utility in linux.
Which tapes are you talking about?
I just checked on CDW - correct me if I'm wrong:
1) DLTs are about $2/GB of native capacity - $30-35 for 15GB.
2) DDS3s are about $0.85/GB of native capacity - $10 for 12GB.
3) Ultriums are about $0.80/GB of native capacity - $80 for 100 GB.
Are my numbers wrong here? Given that some IDE drives are now right at $1/GB, I'm not sure that the tape argument will hold true in the long run.
It's not free, but it's faster than tar (heh, heh) and the Linux support is getting better.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"