Backup device

[Lorenzo Thurman]

I need a backup device for a Beige G3. I have been considering a DDS
tape drive, but I'm open to most anything. I'd prefer an internal
device, but that's not strictly necessary. My data requirements are not
too big on daily basis, maybe sveral 10's of megs, but initially and
periodically, I'll do full backups which will require a few hundred
megs. The 20/40 DDS drives seem to fit the bill. Of course, it has to
work with Linux. Anyonehave any suggestions?
TIA

[jim bob and joe bob]

Post by Lorenzo Thurman
I need a backup device for a Beige G3. I have been considering a DDS
tape drive, but I'm open to most anything. I'd prefer an internal
device, but that's not strictly necessary. My data requirements are not
too big on daily basis, maybe sveral 10's of megs, but initially and
periodically, I'll do full backups which will require a few hundred
megs. The 20/40 DDS drives seem to fit the bill. Of course, it has to
work with Linux. Anyonehave any suggestions?
TIA

I would suggest a CD/DVD burner but have yet to get mine working under
Debian Woody, also on Beige G3. The various burner packages (cdrecord,
xcdroast, etc) want to have the IDE drive made to look like SCSI to the
system/burner software and all the instructions I have found to do that
involve modifying lilo or using open firmware, both of which are
unavailable on this machine. People criticize me for running old junk
but thats all I know (grin).
kk

[Keith Keller]

Post by Lorenzo Thurman
I need a backup device for a Beige G3. I have been considering a DDS
tape drive, but I'm open to most anything.

Aren't many DDS drives SCSI? Unless you have a SCSI adapter, you
may run into trouble. If you can find a Firewire or ATAPI DDS
drive, it should work fine. You may need to use the ide-scsi
kernel module to get standard backup tools like mt to work with
the tape drive, but that would go for any tape drive that wasn't
SCSI. Basically, anything that's a tape drive and can be connected
to the box should work with linux.

If you'll be under 500MB, you can also try a zip drive. You might
need to span two disks for a full backup, but IIRC the drives are
a lot cheaper than DDS. (I've seen many people report that zip
disks are not very reliable, but I haven't had a problem in the
2-3 years I've been using them for backups. Yes, I check them
periodically.)

--keith

[Thomas Jahns]

Post by Keith Keller

Post by Lorenzo Thurman
I need a backup device for a Beige G3. I have been considering a DDS
tape drive, but I'm open to most anything.

Aren't many DDS drives SCSI? Unless you have a SCSI adapter, you
may run into trouble. If you can find a Firewire or ATAPI DDS

The beige G3 models still have mesh-SCSI, not great but enough to drive
almost any DDS-drive at full speed.

But I would recommend something completely different: get a firewire
card and use a firewire disk. Unless you can get DDS drive or tapes for
free it will probably be cheaper that way and _much_ faster. When I
still made my backups to tape it took more than 2 hours to finish, with
hard disks in IDE/firewire enclosures it takes less than 20 minutes.

Thomas Jahns