Tape drive

[Matt Morgan]

Can anyone recommend a tape drive that meets these requirements?

1) easy to get working in Fedora Core 3 & 4
2) reliable
3) works fine with Amanda
4) 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.

Thanks!

[John Summerfield]

Matt Morgan 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.
>
> Thanks!

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.

Once you have some candidates, then ask here (and maybe nahant, where 
they take their computing more seriously:-))

[Matt Morgan]

On 11/30/05, John Summerfied  wrote:
> Matt Morgan 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.
> >
> > Thanks!
>
> 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.
>
> Once you have some candidates, then ask here (and maybe nahant, where
> they take their computing more seriously:-))

Thanks to John and Joel. I didn't realize how straightforward it is.

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 23:52 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> Matt Morgan 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.
> >
> > Thanks!
>
> 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.
>
> Once you have some candidates, then ask here (and maybe nahant, where 
> they take their computing more seriously:-))

----
I'm not so sure that nahant list takes computing more seriously, the
price of entry ensures that the list is mostly of admins whereas Fedora
has a lot of Linux newbies.

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'

As John suggests, SCSI tape drives will pretty much work out of the box
with most software. IDE tape drives will certainly cause more setup
grief.

Craig

[Les Mikesell]

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.

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 00:10 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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

----
I am not as eager to use amanda and painless in the same sentence as I
found it somewhat difficult to get it started. Once I understood how
amanda worked and got it rolling, it is incredible. It doesn't however
have any tool other than command line for restore which pretty much
means that all restores are done by technologically inclined users.

Also as supplied in rpm, I have not seen the ability for amanda to span
a backup across more than a single tape though I am told that the cvs
version can do so.
----
> 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.

----
Since the OP asked about tape devices and mentioned 'non technically
savvy users', I thought it more responsive to suggest something that had
those capabilities at its heart and think that bacula/bacula web/webmin
bacula restore offered more utility for the OP

Craig

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 00:54, Craig White wrote:
> I am not as eager to use amanda and painless in the same sentence as I
> found it somewhat difficult to get it started. Once I understood how
> amanda worked and got it rolling, it is incredible. It doesn't however
> have any tool other than command line for restore which pretty much
> means that all restores are done by technologically inclined users.

I've used it for years.  If you have indexing on, the restore
process isn't horrible but still not very intuitive.  Since finding
backuppc I only use amanda for tapes to be kept offsite and
hope I don't ever need to do a restore from them.
> Also as supplied in rpm, I have not seen the ability for amanda to span
> a backup across more than a single tape though I am told that the cvs
> version can do so.

Amanda typically does many filesystems from many machines in a
backup run.  It can't split any individual filesystem across
tapes, but can spread the run over different tapes.  What it
does better than anything else I've seen is automatically
manage the mix of full and incremental runs each night to
fill the tape and be sure you have at least one full of
each filesystem in a predefined tape set and at least an
incremental of every filesystem every night.  It actually
gets an estimate of sizes from each machine before starting
and will bump the incremental levels if needed to make
things fit.

----
> > 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.
>
> Since the OP asked about tape devices and mentioned 'non technically
> savvy users', I thought it more responsive to suggest something that had
> those capabilities at its heart and think that bacula/bacula web/webmin
> bacula restore offered more utility for the OP

Yes, bacula looks like it might do everything in one program
but you really can't beat backuppc for ease of use and
the amount of data it can store in a given amount of space.
It doesn't use tapes (well, you can archive the last backup
off to tape but it's an afterthought), but now that disk
space it cheap it is something to consider.  If offsite
storage isn't necessary or can be arranged by periodically
doing an image copy of the backuppc disk archive, I wouldn't
bother with tapes these days.

[Matt Morgan]

On 11/30/05, Craig White  wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 23:52 +0800, John Summerfied wrote:
> > Matt Morgan 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.
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Once you have some candidates, then ask here (and maybe nahant, where
> > they take their computing more seriously:-))
>
> I'm not so sure that nahant list takes computing more seriously, the
> price of entry ensures that the list is mostly of admins whereas Fedora
> has a lot of Linux newbies.
>
> 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'

Thanks. I'll be administering the OS and software remotely. I just
can't change the tapes from here :-).
> As John suggests, SCSI tape drives will pretty much work out of the box
> with most software. IDE tape drives will certainly cause more setup
> grief.

Thanks again for all the advice.
> Craig
>
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[Joel Jaeggli]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Matt Morgan 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.

any scsi lto-2 is probably pretty good in that respect.

exabyte magnum, hp storage works ultrium 448.

native capacity of around 200GB, rugged tape transport. large eject 
button.
> Thanks!