Re: [cobalt-users] Is is possible to "mirror" RAQ2s?

["Robert G. Fisher" <rfisher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2000 at 06:08:10PM -0400, Gerald Waugh wrote:
> Would you please recommend a good tape drive (that you may have 
> experience with) for the SCSI port, and the software to make it 
> function properly.

Seagate makes some decent drives.  I still use tar for backups
although you could look at afio for software compression (you
can use software compression with tar, but one bit gets damaged
your entire backup is lost as it's one file, afio compresses files
individually so if there's damaged parts of the backup you still
lose those files but you don't lose everything on the backup)
or check out BRU (www.estinc.com) for local backups.

The particular drive you purchase should depend on how large your
hard drive is, how often you want to swap tapes as well as how
many full vs. incremental backups you use as part of your routine.

You can actually purchase DDS-3 8 tape autoloaders for around 
$1500US, that way even with large hard disks you wouldn't have
to change the tape cartridges but perhaps once a week or even
less often -- although I would recomment at least once a week
to allow for storage of the data at a remote location since 
what happens to your data if your network center catches fire...
replacing the hardware is far easier than replacing months of
data when there's no reliable backup left.

The gotcha w/ the RaQ and RaQ2 is total system failure.  if the
/ sector was damaged, there is no way to boot up to a rescue disk
so if there was a problem, you would need to open the case, attach
it to a machine that either ran linux or booted to linux via a rescue
disk, and be able to attach the tape drive to that machine or to
be able to restore the / partition to bootable status before the
restore operation could continue -- still, if you have a small
bit of experience in mounting filesystems and using say tar and
are not intimitade by the insides of a PC, this is not that major
of an operation so much as a pain in the butt to go through.


-- 
Robert G. Fisher		     NEOCOM Microspecialists Inc. 
System Administrator/Programmer      (540) 666-9533 x 116