[SWLUG] USB backup storage devices

[Dafydd Walters]

o-Dzin Tridral wrote:
> I've been wondering about the DVD writers e.g. from LaCie and Iomega,
> but would appreciate your advice and experience re DVDs, Disk drives,
> tapes and anything else that might be used for backing up.  About 2Gb
> capacity would backup data.  60Gb would backup the whole system.

I'd be happy to share my experiences with DVD and tape.

I have three DVD writers, all from different vendors (LiteOn, Sony and MSI), 
and they all work great with growisofs (I've never had much luck with 
dvdrecord).  I find them very useful for making small backups, and, of 
course, for DVD duplication.  They all support multiple standards (+/-, 
R/RW, etc), and they each cost well under £100. I've had to update the 
firmware on the MSI and the LiteOn to make them recognise certain blank 
media. One of the vendors (I can't remember which) provided the firmware 
update program as a Windows binary only, but it ran absolutely perfectly 
under WINE, so I didn't have to resort to ripping the drive out and putting 
it in a Windows machine just to update the drive's firmware.

I looked around a couple of years ago for an affordable tape backup 
solution, and the best bang-for-the-buck I could find then was OnStream. 
When I looked, they did 30GB and 60GB tape drives (which they describe as 
60GB and 120GB because they assume that the data is compressed 2:1). Theirs 
is a propreiatary technology, I think (you can't use standard DAT drives), 
and the media is a bit expensive but comes with a lifetime guarantee.  The 
30GB IDE-interface drive I bought a couple of years ago has worked 
flawlessly since I bought it, and I've never had any tapes go bad on me (I 
run a full backup each night which fills a tape, and I rotate four tapes). 
The standard tape backup tools (tar, mt) worked out-of-the-box on my Red Hat 
7.3 system using the ide-scsi kernel boot parameter (as long as I remember 
to specify -b 64 to tar, and retension the tape with mt before each backup).

I hope that helps.

Regards,
Dafydd Walters.