I'm here for my latest sysadmin question. I need to be backing up 100GB of raw data (might compress to 70 or 80GB if we're lucky).

I'm currently considering LTO2 at 200GB native and that should tide me over for quite a while.

Does anyone have any opinions on the various tape technologies?

We previously had DDS4 and DLT IV drives and the media/drives seem to be reliable enough. The software was more of a problem than the hardware.

AIT seems a bit expensive.
DDS5 doesn't give me the capacity.
SLDT is an option.

Also, any recommendations on software? The previous software was Tapeware where we probably got what we paid for (i.e. bundled with the tape drive)

Thanks guys

I personally would suggest a large capacity HD in an external firewire drive box. Much faster than tape, and probably at least as reliable if not more so. Definitely cheaper, though.

pca

I have considered external drives. I want to have snapshot backups though for at least the past 6 months (monthly) and the past month (weekly).

Tape cost is around A$90/200GB compared with at least A$160 for a 200GB HDD + casing.

Still cheaper in the long run though. BUT I need to have an offsite backup too and harddrives aren't exactly tough when carried around.

We use dlt and sdlt drives. The sdlt we use are 160/320. Seem fairly reliable , but are pretty pricey. I think a bare SDLT drive is about 3000 US $ . Sdlt tapes are around 40-60 bucks per, so depeding on they cycle you want it can get pricey. If you need a new scsi card thats a good 360 US $ also.

The firewire external drive scenario looks like it may be a good option, just be careful with magnetic fields and such. External drives would also be much cheaper.

Ive used backup exec and its okay. Not too many complaints, but it is the only thing ive used.

DDS4 sucks too. DDS5 probably sucks too.

If it's in your budget, definitely go with LTO. They are some amazing tape drives, and very very fast. LTO drives also generally outpace the speed of IDE hard drives in a firewire or USB enclosure, thus allowing a quicker backup off a RAID device. Basically, LTO is similar to DLT in how it works, but it also adds a memory chip to the tape to store things like the catalog to speed up access. This is the same trick AIT uses to be faster then DAT(DDS), with AIT being very similar to the DAT tapes.

SDLT is an evolution of DLT but really doesn't offer any benefits over what DLT was beyond larger storage space. It is still generally more reliable then AIT or DAT though.

Yeah, there's definitely a market op for a faster Firewire/USB2 IDE interface..

The drives I have here max out at 50-80Mbytes/sec, but the enclosures here (five different ones, all USB2 and/or Firewire) max out at around 30Mbytes/sec.

Cheers