[lopsa-discuss] tape drive recommendations

[Steve Hanson]

Scott Francis wrote:
> On 12/9/05, Bruce A. Hamilton <bhami at pobox.com> wrote:
> 
>>At 10:58 PM 12/8/2005, Scott Francis wrote:
>>
>>>... 35GB of data... to back up daily, ... 2x their current needs
>>>should last them at least five years).
>>>
>>>...small business client with limited funds, ...
>>>... between 50 and 100GB of data
>>>(uncompressed) ... I expect to spend
>>>$500-$600 on a suitable drive, but I'd like to keep the cost of
>>>cartridges down under $20 each if I can.
>>
>>It sounds like you're pretty much limited to DAT72, based on your
>>budget. I'd be interested in hearing what sort of compression folks
>>get with that. On my DDS4 drive (the generation previous to DAT72) at
>>home I only get 25 GB per 20 GB (uncompressed) tape (Windows XP,
>>typical mix of email and whatnot).
> 
> 
> I'm seeing AIT-1 and AIT-2 50/100GB drives in that same price range
> via pricewatch.com (granted, what you see isn't always what's
> available in the end). Assuming equal levels of support by the OS for
> the various hardware formats, are there inherent
> advantages/disadvantages to AIT vs DAT vs SDLT (I already know your
> opinion on the earlier LTO formats :)) ?
> 

You probably should keep in mind that DAT and AIT deal somewhat better
with situations where you can't stream data to it fast enough to keep
the drive busy than SDLT can.  This is likely to be a problem if you're
trying to do remote backup of Windows boxes and don't have a way to
multiplex the data.  Your drive will spend a lot of time shoeshining.

I'd seriously look at bacula (http://www.bacula.org) if you're trying to
back up a number of windows and UNIX systems - at least if you're going
to use a UNIX box as the backup server.