On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 22:11, Craig White wrote:
Can anyone recommend a tape drive that meets these requirements?
- easy to get working in Fedora Core 3 & 4
- reliable
- works fine with Amanda
- stores 200+ Gb on a tape or single set of tapes
If it's easy and obvious how to eject and insert tapes, that's a plus, since this is going to be in a location without any real techies.
I would expect any SCSI drive to work. Choose your vendors and ask them: in this market they're well aware of Linux. Even Dell.
I heavily recommend LTO technology. LTO 100 would store 100Gb uncompressed and amanda certainly works better if you use it without hardware compression. LTO 200 is 200Gb uncompressed.
You should also check out 'bacula' for backup as amanda is clearly not usable for 'location without any real techies'
Amanda is painless as far as making backups goes - all you normally have to do is change the tape sometime during the day and it will send email to remind you if you forget and dump to a holding disk if you still don't do it. So, consider it if you can provide help if a restore is needed - or you can use it for tapes that are held offsite and only used for disaster recovery and set up backuppc (http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/) for easy online access with disk based storage. It uses compression and linking of duplicate copies to hold much more than you would expect.