The saying, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is never truer than when it applies to backing up your data. We look at five of the best tape drives to help you decide which one is right for your Linux system.
From the most hi-tech dot-com to the oldest brick-and-mortar company, any business today is only as good as the information stored in its computers. As a result, conducting a regular backup is one of the most important chores for any system administrator. The increasing use of central storage (even for PC-based networks) simplifies the task to some extent. However, dependence on servers with ever-growing disk drive capacities necessitates the growth of back-up systems.
This article surveys some of the back-up tape drive systems available for Linux servers and workstations today. Since there are several different products available, we decided to take a look at tape drives intended for the smaller servers found in small businesses and fair-sized departments (the primary market for Linux servers). Our goal was to back up at least 10 GB of data without manual intervention (so that back-up could be a “fire and for-get” operation). We wanted each back-up session to use a single piece of media.
We tested five tape drives from four manufacturers: the Ecrix VXA-1, the Quantum DLT 8000, the Hewlett-Packard SureStore DAT40e, and the Seagate Tapestor Travan 20 and Tapestor Travan 20NS.
None of these tape drives are packaged specifically for Linux, which means that we had to find our own back-up software to drive the units. So, we downloaded the Arkeia package…
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