Tell me about tape drives!!

I'm looking to aquire a tape drive for backing up "mission critical" information from my file server.

There's approximately 10GB of material that would I need to have another method to backup - preferably one that lets me make multiple backups and allow me to take those backups off-site.

I did a bit of searching on tape drives and what a minefield!! I am leaning towards a 20/40 GB drive.

Just looking for ideas for anyone who uses/used a tape backup on a regular basis and any thoughts/suggestions on what to look for or traps to avoid.

Cheers,

ICE.

 

Hi iceolated.

Don't get one. For convenience get a USB (external) hard disk drive. For multiple instances, get two. Get a large drive and you can put multiple instances on the same drive (multiple backups rotating each day)

Tape drives can be a real bear. If they get a little hot (in a vehicle for example) they will stretch, humidity will also affect them. If you lay one down near a motor it can get partial or fully erased by the magnetic field. I had one consistently damaged by putting it on a table next to a wall. There was a high-powered line in the wall and it created drop-outs on the tape. Took a while to figure it out. Moved the table and no more problems. They can get tangled up like a music tape in a tape player and you'll have a handful of tape. I've also used hundreds of 9-track tapes in the big drives with no problems at all. Same with the small units for a pc. All-in-all go for the newer technology and get an external hdd. You can also get a hdd tray and do insert-write-extract and take it home. That way you can use any hdd you want. That's what I do. Very convenient. I backup 8-12 gigs on a regular basis then unplug them and they can't be virused. (Uh-oh. I think I just made a new word. Where's my dictionary?)

giles

 

I had considered the external hard drive and drive tray options. I had a couple of concerns.

First, the machine doesn't have a USB 2.0 connection or Firewire so backing up 20GB on a USB 1.1 connection would be painfully slow, it tops out at 12Mbps ~ 1.5MBs So I'd be dishing out money for a new PCI USB 2.0 card as well.

If I use that external hard drive or drive tray then the drive has to be in place to make a backup. My concern is that a good power surge or other electronic failure could potentially fry that drive and all other backups on it.

I like the idea of being able to make a backup and then remove that backup from the building. With a tape drive or DVD+/-RW I could then make more backups without having to bring the original back. Since even DVD-RAM tops out around 9GB, I would end up swapping disks out during the backup process, which was why I was edging towards a tape drive.

So to be prudent I should have multiple backups on seperate media. Which means either:

Multiple back-up tapes,
Multiple DVD discs,
Multiple external HDs,
Multiple portable HDs.

I can't afford to spend a fortune on this, which is why I was going for an older, lower capacity tape drive. When I say "mission critical" it is not stuff that I can't live without but it is stuff that is impossible to replace - family photos etc.

ICE

 

The first thing I used for backups was Sony/Iomega tape drive. It ran off the printer port. It took all night to do a back up of a 2 GB drive. Then when I needed it, the tape broke. Now I use a external hard drive (USB 2.0/Firewire ) for a full system backup. I use a DVD or CD for smaller backups.

 

Hi iceolated,

You may want to investigate backup programs and how they work. You should only need to make a basic backup of those files that are not changing, which may take a few DVD disks (and make double copies). You then tell the program to backup those files that have changed since the last backup (surely 10 gb of files haven't been changed in a day?). The day to day backups are those files that have changed, you should not have to backup those files that are unchanged.

Maybe for safety use two backup programs. I was p***** when I tried to restore a backup and it said it was in the wrong format... not something you want when you've lost your original data. I did have another backup from another program and was soon back in business.

If you get a DVD burner you can use it for other "stuff ". Tape drives aren't much "fun ".

Matt

 

Thesse days its all about size. Some tape drives are wonderful. I had an Iomega for years and it was easy to use
came specifically integrated for restore with Windows and
was good for up to 2 G. It was extremely reliable. My only complaints were:
The tapes themselves were expensive;
It took a little longer to restore from a tape back up.
With todays new large hard drives backing up with tape
is not as good a solution comparatively. You might give some thought to SATA hard drives. I have a seagate which came
wtih bundled software that is exceptionally easy to work with. Very small learning curve. A lot more bang for your buck. Unlike CDRW's hard drives can be written over
extensively and will last you fr a very long time.

 

Hi Ice,

One last thought ... I used to use tape to backup a 24MB (!!) hard drive on my Amiga 2000. With tape, it's all or nothing at all on a restoration ... you can't restore selectively (unless the technology has changed in the last seven years).

With hard drive, CD, etc, and a program like Drive Image, you have the option of selectively restoring files if necessary.

 

It has. The last tape drive I had was one I purchased about 6 years ago. It had the ability to selectivly restore individual files. Even so, I'd opt for an extra hard drive or dvd burner for this. Perhaps things have changed in the way of speed too, but the one I had was one of the fastest in it's day. Still far to slow for me. Far slower than a USB hard drive would be even without USB 2.0 .

 

Zander ...

Thanks for the info. I bought my tape drive at least ten, probably twelve, years ago for use on a different platform. It seemed outrageously expensive but, at the time, there really was no other way to back things up, other than with floppies. The CD burner was still in the future, and my CD-ROM drive used caddies (anyone remember them?) and read disks at the blazing speed of 3x ... most were still 1x and 2x! Ah, the good old days.

 

Just my 2 cents:

Since others have given plenty of suggestions, I'll just tell you my feelings on tape drives. For the price that you spend on a tape drive, backup software, and a few tapes, I think it's the worst investment in the backup field. It's absolutely ridiculous how many message boards you'll find of network administrators complaining about their tape backups. At our company, we've spent about $3000 on a tape backup system that gives us more problems than anything in our network. We probably could've implemented a better system buying ten 200 gig external hard drives. Veritas Backup Exec is the standard backup software, and it's quite possibily the worst software I've ever used.

I don't want to give the impression that a tape backup system is totally useless--it's defiinitely not. Most days, the system works as it's supposed to. But for the cost of the total system, the hassles you'll be dealing with are not going to be worth it, especially with all the other alternatives out there.

Keith

 

Well, I wasn't planning on spending a chunk of $ on a tape drive. I had a line on a couple for $25-$40. Older, lesser capacity but adequate for my needs.

I don't think the machine would run a DVD drive that well as it's only a 500 Mhz and I don't want to lay out the money for a drive if I can't use it to it's full capacity.

I think I may opt for the drive tray- I have an older 3.2 GB Seagate drive floating around somewhere. If I can pick up another small drive that'll give me a decent backup capacity for now.

Thanks for the suggestions and inputs. I know that tape drives were a lot more common back in the day but didn't realize they had fallen out of favor so much.

Cheers,

ICE.