[lug] Tape backup products

[John Karns]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, DeVerter at robinsonmechanical.com said:

>      I am using a combination of DDS-3 and DDS-4 tape drives on our LAN for
> nightly backups, all for backing up 'windows' data (I have user files and
> CAD drawings stored on two Linux file servers and an NT Lotus Notes
> server).
>      Recently, I changed one of my backup machines to RH7.0 with Arkeia as
> the backup interface product but its tapes cannot be read on my other
> backup machines that use either NT Backup (W2K) or Backup Exec from Seagate
> (the same problem I would have if I just cpio'ed).  I have the opportunity
> to rebuild one more of my backup machines to Linux but I need to use a
> backup product that will write tapes compatible with the aforementioned
> products.
>      Does anyone have ideas for Linux backup solutions you can point me
> towards?

Assuming that your need for compatibility between the Linux side and MSW
side is based on being able to restore from an archived tape that was
created on the older MSW set up, if it were me I'd consider the
possibility of using VMWare on the Linux machine to address those
situations.  I would also assume that your tape drives are SCSI.

Although I don't profess to know how well VMWare would deal with SCSI tape
drives, although it does recognize my SCSI CDROM drive without problems.

A VMWare solution wouldn't be as fast as a running the software natively
of course, but if it's only for an occasional restore though it might not
be a problem for you.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net