Linux Server Backup Solutions

[Richard Braun]

On Fri, 14 May 2004, Jeremy Portzer wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 21:07, James Brigman wrote:
>
>> If you're stuck with the Exabyte, buy lots of cleaning tapes and 
>> use them often to keep the heads clean. It ought to work a tad bit 
>> better that way. Then use the $$ cost of the cleaning tapes to 
>> justify something sane, like a DLT.
>
> Last night at the TriLUG meeting, a number of people mentioned that 
> cleaning tapes are a bad idea because their abrasive nature can wear 
> out the drive heads after a while.  Any thoughts on that comment?

I'm feeling a need to repeat a bit of lore I gathered from my graduate 
days...  We used Exabytes heavily (for data taking, not backups); I 
think our usage accelerated the wear effects you would see from 
backups.  The drives would be writing continuously (24/7, quite 
literally) for weeks at a time.  And we experienced huge amounts of 
write errors due to worn tape heads.  Eventually I heard that low-cost 
8mm videos tapes, which many people used as opposed to the data-grade 
tapes, were the culprit (Exabyte has docs online stating as much, if 
not so emphatically).  Once we switched to data-grade (and refurbished 
all our drives) the problem occured much less often.

This was several years ago, but I heard so many stories about Exabyte 
tape problems, which grew into general disatifaction w/ tapes in 
general, I can't help but wonder how much this fiasco influenced 
future generations :)  I think some newer tapes, such as AIT, do not 
require cleaning tapes, except very occasionally, as they continuously 
clean their heads, though I haven't seen "warnings" about overcleaning 
them.

-- 
rtb
======================================================================
Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0129
Email: braun at cs.duke.edu .. Office: D133 LSRC .. Phone: (919) 660-6573