Tape Backup

[Joseph Sinclair]

It looks like the HP DAT-72 USB drives work with Linux.  With 36GB native capacity, they should work quite well for your application.
If you're willing to swap tapes a little more often, a DDS-4 drive (20GB native capacity) would save about $120.
Either way the tapes are around $10-$15 with the drive costing around $550-$750.

With tape it's important to always verify the backup immediately (most backup solutions offer this as an option), but it does roughly double the backup time (from ~2 to ~4 hours for this situation).
Also, always rotate media, since tape fails at roughly the same rate as disk (media MTBF), but it's a bit more silent about it.  Rotating media not only prolongs media life, it also reduces the probability that a single media failure will result in catastrophic data loss.  Running double backups can also help reliability (each backup is run twice, to two non-overlapping media pools), but it again doubles the backup window and also doubles the number of tapes used.

==Joseph++

chip33az at netscape.net wrote:
> Does anyone know of an inexpensive tape backup that works with Linux?  
> Preferably external and USB.  Speed isn't important, but backups are.
> 
> I'm looking to backup my home "server" and using another drive just 
> doesn't appeal to me.  I also don't want to use DVD's as it seems like I 
> would be using about 10+.
> 
> I have about 50GB - 60GB of data to back up.
> 
> Thanks for any guidance.