[PLUG-TALK] Back Up Medium Change

[Rich Shepard]

   My Tandberg SLR-60 tape drive is about 9 years old, and still doing well.
However, last night's full backup had some read/write errors which suggest
that my 5-year-old tapes ought to be replaced. (That's about the life of the
tapes used once every other week as a full backup; the daily tape keeps the
incrementals on a single tape and holds a lot of small changes in 60G.) The
drive asked for a cleaning both last week and this week, so tapes are in
need of replacement. However, these tapes cost a minimum of $73 each (high
of $89 each) and I use three: two alternate for weekly full backups and one
for daily incremental backups.

   I believe that I should be able to buy an external USB hard drive
enclosure and a humongous fast hard drive for less than the cost of three
new tapes.

   Keith took over development and support of a backup system, but I've not
seen much about it on the main list for a while. I've been using BRU (an
exceptionally nice reliable system based on tar that I've used for a dozen
years) and I'd like to continue to use BRU but writing to a hard drive
rather than to /dev/st0. I suppose that I could shut down the
server/workstation and replace the tape drive and SCSI adapter with a hard
drive bay with removeable hard drives.

   What suggestiions have you folks for this? Tape backups have worked for me
since the mid-1980s so I have no issues with tape. Money is a serious
consideration right now. If a replacement system costs me less than three
SLR-60 tapes that would be the way I go.

TIA,

Rich