No problem :)

I've tried to use OpenBSD a couple of times, and it's been a bit of a struggle getting it installed (compared with most distros I've tried, Gentoo excluded!). It has a reputation for stability though; most often I hear of it used for file servers of one sort or another, or firewalls and the like.

I presume if buying new hardware to move the data is out of the question, then buying a whole new LTO2 tape drive for the backups is out of the question? You could get the whole 200GB on a single tape then, although tapes aren't cheap: £25 each (200GB) last time I checked.

For the transfer, couldn't your boss stretch to £50 for a 250GB external drive, and you use that for the transfer?

I could get a new tape drive, but I can't justify it when we're migrating to new hardware in a very short time (new hardware that was already purchased a year ago).

The old hardware is too old for a USB drive; it only has USB 1.0 which is no faster (if not slower) than the network. I should investigate what sort of interface it's using for the DVD drive though. It may be another scsi adapter for those peripheral bays, but if it's IDE I could use that to transfer the data to an IDE drive then use an IDE to USB adapter to get to the new server.

I don't suppose they make scsi to USB adapters :) Hmm, they do! I may have some decent options after all.

If you've got a spare PCI slot on it, perhaps a firewire card might be in order? You'd get good speeds, it's not processor intensive (like USB is), and external drives aren't too pricey. From what I could see of SCSI to USB adaptors, they're pretty expensive.

Hi David,

that machine that you have is it a file server? I'm looking into installing OpenSuse on a good PC then copy all the files there to a secondary drive and use that machine as file/printer server.