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DAT Tape Drive question

dbwillis

dbwillis

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Jul 9, 2002
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I havea small business customer who only has to backup about 12gb of data.
They have been using (for years now) a simple internal Dat20/40 scsi drive.

Seems the drive failed...keeps saying CRC errors, we tried 5 new tapes with the same result.
Ran the cleaner tape several times with no improvement.

Question is...can I replace it with a Dat72 (DDS5) drive and continue to use the Dat20/40 (DDS4) tapes?
Id rather not stick them with buying a new drive and another 10 Dat72 tapes and still have to pay for the 20/40 tapes too

(im not worried about backups not running for a few days...I have enough backup setup for them)
Nightly (Mon-Fri) backup to tape
Nightly (7 days) backup to USB drive
Nightly (Mon-Fri) backup to FTP of important quickbook and another 2 DB files
Weekly (Sunday) backup to a laptop "C" that runs a big screen TV 24x7
Weekly (Saturday) backup to tape
 
Greetings

from memory Dat tapes have a media recognition system encoded in the Dat cartridge as a series of codes at the start of the tape, see here for more info

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsuppor...odTypeId=12169&objectID=lpg50457#lpg50457_mrs

usually backward capability of the drive is limited, like LTO I believe it is 1-2 generations for read/write and maybe 2-3 generations for read only access, have a look at the chart as this illustrates this aspect, you have to check the specifications of the replacement drive whether it can do it or not, if you have write capability then it can continue re-using the old tapes, if your not sure all you can do is try, the media recognition will spit out tapes that are too old to use even in read only mode and if you can only read them you'll find out the hard way as you won't be able to write to them.

If its HP gear you are going to replace it with then it appears you should be OK from the above info, but if its a different manufacturer then you had better check before you buy a replacement.

Hope this helps

Cheers
 
All the DDS-5 drive i've encountered (HP and Quantum) are all backwards compatible to DDS-3.
 
Just an update for anyone that cares...
When really pressed about future plans...they said there could be an increase this time next year maybe to 90gb (they are at ~40gb now, so we looked at RDX drives....
In the end, we went with 5x 128gb Kingston Flash drives
two pluses...backups finish faster than the tapes did, and they can restore on any machine with a USB port
 
but i ran into so much problem with flash drive die after like 20-30 backup restore, so far tape still more durable than flash...
 
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