I been google'n for 2days and cant find a good alternative besides tape drives
why tape drives are so expensive

I tried 7zip, and Windows compress drive "yes my server is LINUX" besides I dont how reliable this methods are

I need something close to 2:1 ratio since I have 3 full HDDs of 350GB and adding 1 more

been looking for HDD compression software? if there is any!, I guess I might end up doing D2D backup, but I want something that scales up when I add more HDDs to my file server

in my research I ended up finding an interesting drive from iomega REV drive you need their drive + the media = $534 for 360GB backup + $164 for every 360GB backup = around $862 (in a review I saw how awful it compresses data thou, so it's not going to reach 90GB compressed this might be not an option) 'if someone has one and tried it tell us if it works"
"the drive can be USB,Firewire,Sata,Pata for about the same price"

VS

3 HHDs of 400GB = $ 880, $18 more expensive but the transfer rate and 50GB extra on ea. makes up for it I think. "not including ex-enclosure"

VS

now for the tape drives:
Tape drive: vs160 around $600 + around $50/ea. media of 160GB compressed need 6 tapes = $300 total of $900. $20 more expensive but scales up nicely since 320GB extra will be $100 more

for the tape drive: SDLT 320 is around $900 + around $55 for media of 320GB compressed = $1'065 ouch!!! but $55 for 320GB
"this is not including scsi controller on tape drives"

But I read that tape drives are more vulnerable to magnetic stuff than HHDs not sure if this is a myth. I wouldn't want to spent that much money to find out later that my backups are not backups anymore ;_;

so what you think guys?
please tell me someone has a magical solution for me

Since going the route with tape drives is not really in your budget, why not just use tar? It has good compression and if you wanted more, pipe a gzip to it.

-twantrd

tape drives are the best for taking backups of large volumes and they give u 2:1 compression, though they cost a bit, they are worth it, or as twantrd put it, compress it, but the level of compression will depend of the file type, text files will get a good compression , but how abt image or vid files

There are plenty of compression programs on Linux - gzip, bzip2, zip just to name a few. Tar itself isn't a compression program - it can only compress stuff in combination with gzip or bzip.

As for the backups if you can't afford a tape drive then for that amount of data I think the only realistic possbility is removable hard drives. A simple USB case for a normal IDE or SATA hard drive is about $50, then you just have to pay for the harddrive itself. This is the only cheap way to backup hundreds of gigs of data.

I'm not sure which is more vulnerable (or if they are about equal) but any significant magnetic field will wipe data wether its on a hardrive or tape drive. Almost every major corporation and most medium size businesses backup their data to tape so they must be reasonable reliable. Of course most businesses have their backup tapes collected and sent to an off-site data storage place every day where they will be protected from magnetic fields, moisture and stuff like that that can wreck them.

I ended up choosing HDD mobile racks for backup that way I can swap'em, till I save enough money for a tape drive

Out of subject does anybody know a good S.M.A.R.T monitoring tool with GUI if possible I seen

smartmontools

Thanks for the input

That is correct. Sorry about that.

-twantrd

newegg has, I think it was, 100/200 gig DAT3 tape cartridges for around $30.00, and 20/40 for about $8.00 US.

I was looking around on ebay, and there are a lot of tape drives there for cheap. Might be worth looking into. Im definatley considering a tape drive for my home pc. With an 80 gig hard drive, I really dont have time or the money to swap around a bunch of dvds.

Last tape drive I had was an older 410Mb one which plugged into the floppy drive. Damn was that thing slow. I see the newer ones are rated at a fairly high transfer rate. They seem good, almost too good to be true.