I was bitching about tape backups at one place, now I am moving another place from DVD based backups to tapes.
They ( the second place ) doesn’t use much storage so we can use older and cheaper tape drives from eBay.
I’ve paid £20 for 7 drives! These are not all the latest but included DAT-72 and DLT 40/80 can provide very decent capacity.
However I am planning to use DDS-3 , cartridges are physically small and much cheaper than others. 12GB provided is plenty of space for this system.
DVD backups on Linux, yeah they worked for a while, but stupid limitations of growiso ( it will not overwrite dvd-rw if it runs from cron ) and disc failures just made the decision for me. Tapes are much longer used in that role and the archiving software is totally integrated into Linux.
backup, rant
My current arrangement for backup is Dell PowerVault 122T SDLT and Backup Exec 10 on Windows 2000 Server, at least at one place.
The only thing which I can say about it is … unreliable.
Tape library has mechanical problems, build in tape drive has tape errors more often than 3 girls combined periods. And it’s apparently almost brand new, in 3 years history, it was replaced twice, last time 3 months ago …
Backup software looses it’s agents or communication with media part of it’s self at least once a week.
The best part is that we do not change much, backup schedules and selections changed maybe 2 times in 3 years. Tape drive always gets good tapes and a new set every month. So it should just work … but is doesn’t.
I’ve even tried to use it with a HP D2D Virtual Tape library, but sodding software does not handle iSCSI well enough to actually make it usable.
Why someone can’t make a solution which just works and works and works for years, why it has to become shit after so short period of time ?
I wrote about it because I had to spend 2h, yesterday, trying to get this shit to run.
backup, rant, windows
