Hello,

I'm looking to add a tape device to my Fedora Core 3 box so I can do a backup of my secondary hard-drive (which is a 40GB FAT32 SAMBA share). I'd like the drive to be super easy to implement (install) so Fedora configuration is minimal.

Can somebody recoment an external tape drive, or external Hard-drive that is easily compatible with Fedora Core 3 and doen't require A LOT of software manuipulation?

Basically, I'm hoping to plug the drive in and be able to mount it so I can either DD to it or CP to it then umount once the backup has completed and store the device in a fire-safe.

The box that my Fedora Core 3 is running on is a Dell Dimension 2350 with 3 hard-drives. 1 for the OS, 1 for the SAMBA share(40GB) and 1 for the 2nd'ary backup.

Thanks everyone !!!

Joshua

Hello,

I think any USB or FIREWIRE external HD is very good and easy recognized by the system so it's quite easy to mount and backup/restore to/from it. I have a 250 Maxtor external HD with both firewire and USB. You can find one for 250$.

The use of a tape drive (DDS tapes) cost a lot and the speed of the tape drive isn't very good. In this way, you will also need a SCSI card. It's not possible to mount a tape so you need to read the full tape to restore a file ....

In my opinion, the best is the use of external HD.
--
free_ouyo

"Basically, I'm hoping to plug the drive in and be able to mount it so I can either DD to it or CP to it then umount once the backup has completed and store the device in a fire-safe."

A tape is a device, not a mountable file system. you cannot mount and umount tapes. By far the best command to use to copy data to and from tapes is tar.

"Can somebody recoment an external tape drive, or external Hard-drive that is easily compatible with Fedora Core 3 and doen't require A LOT of software manuipulation?"

You can use pretty much any external tape drive that attaches to the IDE controller, the SCSI controller, or the floppy controller. I have no idea whether or not a USB tape is supported. Tape drives are suported with the ftape driver. Here is a howto for ftape using floppy tape drives. The main difference with other tape drive types is that they connect on different device addresses.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Ftape-HOWTO.html

I used an external tape for several years. I think that tape drives are a lousy way to do backups and restore, especially restore. I highly recommend that you use CD-RW instead.

free_ouyo said:
"In my opinion, the best is the use of external HD."

I agree, as long as you have more than one external HD so that you can keep at least two generations of backup totally detached from your computer.

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Steve Stites

Thanks jailbait and free_ouyo .

Follow-up question to you Jail :

I have 27GB of data to backup from this drive. CD-RW's would need it's own library for that much data. Besides tape, what other means of off site backup would you recomend?

PS. I've already excluded on-line web-space backup.

Thanks again.

"I have 27GB of data to backup from this drive. CD-RW's would need it's own library for that much data. Besides tape, what other means of off site backup would you recomend?"

You are right. That much data would be very cumbersome to backup on CD-RW. You could conceivably use DVD-RW, but the best solution would be to buy at least two USB hard drives with at least 30GB capacity each and use those.

Several years ago I remember that there were IDE hard drives that came in a sliding case which plugged into a 5" bay, case and all. You slid the case into your computer and used the drive. Then you removed the hard drive, case and all. If such things still exist I would consider them as well.

There are two major problems with tape backup and recovery. The first is that tapes are not very durable. It is fairly common to find that a backup tape is unreadable either from oxide buildup or a stretched tape. The second is that partial recovery from a tape can be a pain. If you want to only restore a few files then you can spend a lot of time sawing down the tape trying to find the file(s) you need to restore.

--------------------------
Steve Stites

free_ouyo

Do you have a set of instructions (or a link to one) how to mount a USB drive so it's writable?

Thanks in advance,
Joshua