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Cheap Tape Drives for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the budget-friendly-compatible-hardware dept.

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?

1 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Don't do it! by shario · · Score: 3
    I have one word for you: Don't. A running disk drive backup is only good for deletion accidents and broken disk drives, but what if you have

    • a power surge (burns both drives!)
    • an earthquake
    • a fire
    • a kernel level messup making both filesystems unusable
    • a rm -rf / when disk is mounted?

    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 :)