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Cheap Tape Drives for Linux?
Doug Muth asks: "Does anyone have any suggestions for a specific brand of tape drive I should purchase to use under Linux? SCSI tape drives are expensive (plus they require you to get a SCSI adapeter), so I've been looking at some
IDE TR-4 tape drives. However, according Red Hat's Hardware Compatibility List,
while IDE tape drives are "compatible", Red Hat
does not support them." Anyone willing to pass along some helpful suggestions and/or more informaiton on the Red Hat/TR-4 issue?
I really recommend SCSI for backups, mostly because everything supports it and it's pretty much foolproof. It really isn't all that expensive either.
- A.P.
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Don't forget about reliability. Quote from one of our top marketing people (I work for STK, we own the tape market on the high end) "It used to be that all unix systems, SUN, HP, SGI, etc came with Exabyte 8mm tape drives, and it was great, you could do backs all day any time no problem. You never could read the tapes backs, but at least you could check the little box that said you had a backup." (Exabyte has improved since then, and since he is in marketing he was stretching the truth a little) His point was that backups are worthless if you can't read them back. Some of those older tape drives wrote tapes that could only be read on the drive that wrote them (as they got older the heads went out of allignement), and then you were screwed if you had a failure.
That said, SCSI is not that expensive, and scsi drives have a better chance of working. Just buy a scsi adaptor. Soon you will be like me and refuse to touch IDE again... :)
I too am looking for a good backup. Problem is backups are not easy. I want to backup /home which will soon move to a 9 gig disk, or even bigger. (Amanda isn't happy about dealing with partitions bigger then the tape - not saying amanda is the best way to backup), I really want to backup some macs over my network, and nothing deals with that.
I know the driver's beta, and the drives are cheap, but there is an Onstream 30/50G tape driver for Linux.
That said, I might note that DAT drives get tweeky after a while because of their mechanical complexity. (Think VCR, but tiny.) 4mm tapes are cheap, used drives can be a bargain, but don't bet the farm on one. Don't even use it until you get a cleaning tape! (I got mine at the University Bookstore in Seattle.)
QIC/Travan drives are way cheap, moderately reliable, Linux-supported but even the IDE ones are quite slow.
I recently purchased an AIWA QIC tape drive from www.compgeeks.com; it's listed on there for $45 bucks and is IDE based. It lists as being able to read/write to 4GB/8GB compressed tapes which is what I use right now for my LAN at home. Fully Linux supported; and seems to be working fine for me although I've only had it a couple of weeks. Might not be the best solution but it's certainly cheap.
Whenever I recommend a tape drive, it's SCSI DAT all the way. I will let the client know of the cheaper models and then I explain the reliability factor. The whole subject really boils down to this: If you attempt a restore using a cheap drive and it fails, what is the additional price you've just paid? Now that said, let's look at the usage. If this is for business, buy the most reliable tape drive you can afford, if it's for home and you don't care if you lose your 8GB mp3 collection by all means purchase a cheap drive. But then if you don't care about lost data, why are you backing it up? -Pete
I have several Linux and BSD boxes I goof around with at work and one of the big holdups I face with integrating them into the department mainstream is network backups.
Does anyone have any recommendations for centralized network backup software? How about backing up something securely (i.e. outside the firewall, in the DMZ)over the network?
It is actually a 2.5GB, and the 5GB is after compression.
I got it faily cheap (700 Saudi Riyals March 1999 ~ 187$). I saw it cheaper on some internet sites (can't remember which, but try www.shopper.com).
Worked straight out the box on the first try. Did not need to do any kernel recompilation, nor download any drivers...
The only drawback so far, is that it seems the media is a bit hard to find (at times) in the local market (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
Good luck.
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Avoid Sony Superstation drives at all costs. I found out the hard way that they are not Linux compatible at all. I've been using an HP Colorado (7 gigs uncompressed) without problems. I don't know that it qualifies as "cheap", but maybe one of the smaller HP's will do the job for you.
Do all of the HP Colorado family have drivers for Linux? A previous poster mentionned that the 5GB version worked right out of the box. What about the 8 or 14GB?
K.
i dare you to try and erase a DAT. we use them extensivly for both audio recording and system backups. DATs tend not to fail if treated properly. that just means that, as with any magtape, you need to run a cleaning tape once in a while to remove stale magnetic particals from the heads.
as far as the FUD relating to magnetism, we have a system who's drive is less than a foot from the voice coil of a 22" speaker. aside from the occasional rattle when playing quake at full blast, the machine works fine. granted that it is a win2k box i don't much care about, but it's been in that location for some weeks without the drive suddenly going blank.
there's a huge difference between being a foot away from a huge magnet and being 1 micron away from a r/w head (as in a hard drive or dat).
also, don't forget that DATs are digital. that means a value n 0. given n is a proper value, you can have a lot of varience from the first 0 to the second 0 and it will still read a proper value of 0. a little stray magnatisim wont kill your data.
this is why analog tapes suck, and DAT is the standard.
Having the backups up and running is of course good, but also means that you can't store older backups nor have them off-site which makes a backup system quite worthless, IMHO. But you were looking for cheap :)
I just wish there was a way to implement grandfather-father-child type of multi-level backup on Amanda. Anyone?
You can find the source at www.amanda.org, and Red Hat contrib dir in RPM format.
When I can get the damn thing to work, it works great (4 gig native like other TR-4 tapes), but getting it to work is the hard part. I honestly can't understand why it fails (and from what I know of electrical engeneering, it shouldn't in this manner). It just won't work 80% of the time when it's in the drive bay (either 3.5" or 5.25" bays), but when I power down, pull it out, and leave it hanging by the power and IDE cables, it works. Slap it back in and it usually fails again.
Another wierd thing about it is that it has to be secondary master (as per tech support). Won't seem to work as slave at all. Other than that, it works fine in Linux with the IDE Tape driver compiled into the kernel (probably works as a module as well).
Expensive intially can save untold cost later. I bought my Sony DDS3 drive back when they were twice what they are now, and it's been worth every penny. Come to think of it, that drive is the single most expensive computer component I've ever bought; it was money well spent. I've had to restore from tapes as much as 6 months old: no errors, no problems. The QIC80 drives I used to use were not that reliable. Travan etc. is pretty much QIC80 on steriods.
The only problem I have with it is that it's internal compression is about equivalent to gzip -1; I like better. A reasonably fast machine, the alternative compression program of your choice, and the buffer program can solve that problem.
Also, don't buy the "new" Adaptec 2940UWPro (the one that can drive all the connectors at once) SCSI controller to hook your new drive to, it doesn't speak to Sony tapes, and Adaptec's response is: "We know. Too bad." Excretus Est Ex Altitudine
Once you start adding a few tapes, DDS-2 is cheaper than Travan. The break-even is somewhere around 10 tapes. Plus the last time I looked you couldn't clean the Travan drives, while the DDS-2 can be cleaned with a cleaning cartridge.
Current prices from CDW
Sony SDT-7200/BM DDS-2 drive $440
10 DDS-2 tapes $9-10 ea $100 total $540
Seagate TR-4 Travan drive $240
10 TR-4 tapes $31-32 ea $320 total $560
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
1. Go with SCSI.
/home every 12 hours to another separate disk. Once a week I back up the whole computer and every once in a while I back up my useless but fun files. I haven't lost any data in a very long time. I also use an 'rm' script that copies files to $HOME/.trashcan so I have to run my 'dump' script to actually remove them.
2. Run a cleaning tape at least weekly. I run one everytime I use my drive, maybe that's why it still works fine after 5 years.
3. Check your backups to make sure they worked.
4. Figure in the cost of the media as at least as important as the drive itself. Those cheap looking IDE QIC drives have cartridges that not only don't hold much but cost a fortune as well. DAT is _really_ cheap media and holds a lot. You don't have to worry about getting a few extra tapes since it will only cost $20.
5. Since you should go with SCSI anyway, get an external drive. It's very handy to have the capability of taking the drive over to a new machine or a friend's house.
6. It's just plain easier to do incremental backups to another disk, then back up the disk at your convenience. This applies for home use only.
7. Get a data grade fire safe. Those paper grade safes don't help media at all. APStech.com sells a small one for $140.
8. Separate what data you have that is static from that which changes/is important onto different file systems. Backups are lots easier and faster if you don't back up your MP3 collection daily.
My setup: I back up any file that has changed in the last half hour to a separate disk, then back up
we've got an ide travan drive (Seagate STT8000A (which is really a conner i think)) at work and it gives us trouble all the time. ok, i shouldnt really say that. i mean, the problems could be related to the software we use with it (afbackup, evil in its own special way), but we've also run into problems while just tar'ing to it directly. it could be related to the kernel (2.2.6) i suppose but i dont remember any pressing bugs being brought up since that release. also, mt(1) doesnt seem to like it much but again that isnt necessarily attributed to the drive itself either.
not to mention its other weeknesses, mainly 1) its slow and 2) its loud and obnoxious (if only the server didnt reside 5 feet from my desk!).
personally, if it were up to me, the thing would be in the dumpster and we'd have a shiney new scsi dds-3 drive. *sigh*
--Siva
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Hey, yeah. I had that exact problem long ago with big SCSI 1/4" drive (an Archive Scorpion i think). The thing would only work setting on top of the computer, but not when bolted in. It didn't like the case ground.
Think I disconnected a ground strap in the drive to make it work.