Small business tape drives? Backup schemes?

[John Prophet]

So each client has how many travan cartridges now?

Is the server itself backed up to anything?

JP

[MDS]

Jp each client has 3 except accounting has 10 and the server is backed up to DVD-R monthly. Also server runs a IDE RAID 1 drive aray with 4 120gig WD SE drives which means the drives are in pairs to say drive 1 would be the 100% sames as drive 2 and drive 3 would be 100% same as drive 4.

[Peter M]

With Onstream having gone out of business, the lowest cost usable solution is Seagate's Travan drives (20/40 GBytes native/compressed). Stay away from DAT, the technology is too fragile.

[John Prophet]

I just watched one of the www.crn.com "netseminars" about tape backups..they were talking about Exabytes new "packet" technology for tape backups...interesting stuff. Of course each one of those seminars features a company rep, from Exabyte, or Symantec, or ATI etc...so of course they are biased but they can be cool to check out.

JP

[Peter M]

Exabyte VXA technology could be nice too, but they also use the potentially fragile "videotape" approach, pulling the tape out of the cartridge and using a fast spinning head drum. Tape and drive wear is massively worse than with the "quarter inch cartridge" approach that is still being used by Travan (and the deceased Onstream ADR) - here, the tape stays in the cartridge, and the only moving parts in the drive are the head lift and tape drive roller. The entire tape spooling mechanism is in the tape cartridge.

[Tazman]

JP - YGPM .

Mike