[PLUG] tape archive problem

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Oct 17 21:44:38 UTC 2007


On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, RA Cowger wrote:

> The tape drive is a HP T1000e formerly Colorado Data connected to the
> parallel port.  The printer is also connected to the same port through the
> tape drive.

   Uh-oh! Years ago I spent a lot of time -- and money -- trying to get
CDS/HP 'floppy' tape drives to work. Finally gave up on 'em. And this was on
the advice of the guy who had written the driver and knew those drives and
linux/UNIX better than anyone. The parallel port drives are just as bad.

> Can anyone help me get this thing working, is it possible to make it work?

   If you want to use tape, get a better system. I've used only tapes for
backup on linux the past decade, and have been happily using a Tandberg Data
SLR-60 drive for the past 6 years. It's a SCSI drive, I replace the tapes
every couple of years, and it works flawlessly from cron jobs. Incremental
backups Monday-Thursday nights, full backups Friday nights. I've been using
the BRU software for years and it's been a rock-solid combination of
hardware and software.

   I've used the tapes to restore the system to a new hard drive as well as
restoring files I've accidently deleted. Hard drive systems are probably
less expensive now, but this works so well for me that I have no incentive
to change. YMMV.

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |    The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.        |         Accelerators(TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax: 503-667-8863



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