Re: Tape/DVD Backup Suggestions?

<<TESTIMONIAL ON>>

I used DLT in industry and didn't like it due to excessive rewinding
and a pain to deal with.

I use a HP DDS drive purchased a year or so ago on one older Sun box,
but forgot which DDS version. No problems ever, but I don't buy
noname tapes. Just wait for a sale and buy a bunch...

Won a free external VXA Ecrix drive at a CLUG (Linux) meeting.
Tapes cost much more than DDS ones, but they have extra
redundancy in their methods, so theoretically, years from
now, you will have better luck reading all the tape. And you
can supposedly boil the tape and still read it... :-)

But, I'm constantly re-creating the world, and not interested in
archiving every database change for historical reasons, so I don't
chew through tapes. I just want to be able to re-create the world
even if there is some catastrophic failure or worst-case
hack scenario. With tape and dedicated disks for backup,
I don't worry.

Boiling tapes notwithstanding. There was a two-tape VXA version
bundled with a bunch of tapes for a decent price awhile back,
via a promotion, before their new technology came out, before
the Exabyte merger took hold in the product lines. Have one of
those, so you can write two tapes serially or in parallel. Have
seen those cartridge tape changers fail in industry. There we always
purchased tape drives in pairs, even external ones, even if one sat
on a shelf. [Unless it was some big robotic multi-tape system that
cost a fortune...] The VXA stuff works fine with Linux. But I don't
entirely trust any tape for backups, so I have a few extra SCSI disk
drives just for overlapping backups. The kind that pop out of the
enclosure, so they can be stored elsewhere, like tapes.

I think the proprietary vs. non-proprietary thing with tape is not all a
proprietary/non-proprietary issue. Why do I say this? (i) Because in
reality tape drive heads can drift over time, so you might have drifted
away from a non-proprietary setup, and then the effect is the same.
Maybe that's just old school experiences, and engineering now is
good enough so that doesn't happen. And (ii) they're all manufactured
by some company, not like software, and each by definition has
quality control issues at some level or another. However, cost of tape
should be a concern, if you really go through them in the backup scheme.

Dust and particulate matter around a tape drive is something to
look out for!!! Those particles may hose your database backup someday.
And keep them away from monitors and cheap power supplies.

Haven't missed the money of industry, IT departments, Oracle, Sybase, Ingres,
CA-Ingres (reamola) and all that, and this Linux stuff is great for saving the
contents of my change-purse. A necessity at universities. No free beer on
Fridays, but much more sanity in my vicinity with PostgreSQL.
No per-seat, per-CPU, per-anything headaches. I've been watching it
develop since Postgres95. Had the air of dignity about it back then too,
but back then I was just a voyeur.

douglas

p.s. I've *never* been let down by tar.
p.p.s. GNU tar is even better than the old tar.

Tony Reina wrote:

> Thanks everyone. I think I'll go with one of the tape solutions (DLT,
> Exabyte VXA-2, or AIT) after all. If I can get the 80G native/160 Gig
> compressed, then I can probably get buy with one or two tapes. That
> should make my single-file restores a little less onerous.
>
> -Tony