[H-GEN] Linux backup tool of choice

[Stuart Longland]

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Christopher Biggs wrote:

| Hideously slow, unreliable, cheap and nasty, expensive to feed, and
| since they're proprietary the linux driver had to be
| reverse-engineered.

Fair enough, but they're better than *no* backup capabilities.  The
drive cost us nothing, and we've got some tapes we can feed it with,
sure they're QIC-40 & QIC-80 tapes we had from an old 12MB Trakker
(Parallel port tape drive *shudders*), and 170MB tapes should be
available *somewhere*.  They're certainly more common than 5.25" 2.6GB
optical cartridges. ;-)

Considering the driver was reverse engineered, it does a good job
nevertheless.

The drive we have is actually for a server that we're building for the
Asperger's Syndrome Support Network.  The idea being we set it up to do
regular backups onto tape of the full system, say, fortnightly, and
overnight partial backups, therefore it's a case of changing tapes when
they open the office up in the morning.

My father's actually spotted another MO drive (Sony SMO-F544, identical
to the one I've got) which we could use as an alternative, but so far,
we're still trying to track down the media.  Cheapest price was about
$60 through Data Services in Melbourne (Imation 2.6GB 5.25" media).
I've yet to see if the one in my machine works - Linux detects it as
/dev/sda, Windows sees it as I:.  Don't know what Syllable will make of
it yet.

| Oh and tiny, tiny capcity; the "N Megabyte" on the box has lots of
| asterisks after it.  N/3 is more realistic.

True, a lot do rely on compression, I think the tapes this beast takes
are actually 170MB uncompressed.

|>| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| So what's the problem? :-)
LOL

- --
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Griffith Student No:           Course: Bachelor/IT @ Nathan |
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