At 8:11 Uhr +0200 30.09.1999, Jukka Marin wrote:
>First, sorry for the waste of bandwidth - please reply privately as this
>doesn't really belong here..

Not sure about that...  ;)

>I have been using a Sony DAT (DDS-2) drive for daily backups in a small
>NetBSD network.  The drive has always had its bugs, needing power-cycling
>every now and then, but now it seems to be dying for good.
>
>I'd like to hear from other NetBSD users about good and reliable backup
>systems.  Should I get another DAT drive or some 1/4" inch Tandberg that
>a dealer recommended to me (and no-one else has ever heard about) or
>just get a large disk and create tarballs on it every night?  The data
>that needs backing up is valuable (to me, at least ;-)

Don't DAT. I have seen too many dead drives...

From recent experience with a NetBSD/Amanda backup server at work I can
heartily recomment Tandbergs SLR series (SLR5 here). Amanda
<http://www.amanda.org/> built cleanly from the package -- most of the
people reporting trouble on amanda-users appear to run linux =8>. The setup
currently backs up ~35GB of disk space.

If a DDS-2 drive (4G?) did the job for you until now I don't think you
really need DLT unless you want to do brute force full backups every night.
Even then, you still have sustain the data rate to keep it streaming - we
have a 2x i386 PPro Netfinity SAP R3 server at work that is incapable of
streaming its DLT.

Only drawback of QIC is that NetBSD's st(4) QIC support sucks... You have
to hack in "quirks" for contemporary devices yourself.

	hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)