Steve wrote: > > On Monday 07 November 2005 20:55, James Oltman wrote: > > I am getting my hands on a slightly used DDS4 external SCSI tape > > drive. I am also getting about 7 tapes. <snip> > > just so you know, tape isn't a great backup medium, your > better off buying a > 300gig harddrive, copying everything over and then storing > the harddrive in a > safe place. Or even just burning everything to DVDR.
Bollocks, hard drives have electrics to go wrong as _well_ as all the other problems with keeping those little magnets aligned. ;-) Trust me, I've been there, I copied 160Gb to a drive, verified it was all there, wiped the original data and then discovered the 160Gb drive had died. OTOH I was going through the archived tapes at work[1] and out of curiosity tried the oldest tape I could find that we still had a drive for[2], still worked fine. If you're worried about wearing it out again don't be, we use loads of different tapes in various tape cycles, some are years old and get used every day. There are tape libraries where there are *hundreds* of tapes and the data is constantly swapped between tapes, Should be _NO_ problem with one small PC backup/restore! In the past I've accidently booted a tape right the way across the machine room with no ill effects, try that with a hard drive (or even drop it, touch it after walking across a nylon carpet etc etc). ;-) DVDR's are better but still fragile in comparison to tapes and are _small_ in capacity. Plus if you've got the drive free tapes are _cheap_, 4ukp (7usd) for 20-40Gb, 300Gb disks are 75ukp (ish, 130usd). so worst case[3] 80% of the cost and if you _do_ get a failure you lose 7% of your storage not 100% (and chances are you'll lose _some_ files rather than everything if a tape dies). Tapes are _designed_ for backup, hard drives are designed for _temporary_ storage space. As for software I'd just look through the available packages included with your distro, SuSE for example include a backup option from yast. If all else fails: cd /video/recordings #or where ever find *.nuv -print | cpio -oc > /dev/st0 read back with: cd /video/recordings cpio -ic < /dev/st0 (or cpio -itc < /dev/st0 to just read it back) David PS Don't rely on getting anywhere near 40Gb, that's compressed and movie files don't compress well, more like 24-26Gb I'd have thought. [1] Chucking the ones over 7 years old (we have to keep them for 7 years) [2] 1989 [3] ie no compression.
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