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Questions tagged [tape]

Tapes are used by a tape backup machine.

209 questions
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8 answers

What are the advantages of tape drives?

IBM still develop and sell tape drives today. The capacity of them seems to be on a par with today's hard drives, but the search time and transfer rate are both significantly lower than that of hard drives. So when is tape drives preferable to hard…
kba
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Are RDX removable disks a good replacement for LTO tape?

Over a period of three weeks, I experienced six complete failures of LTO-1 and LTO-2 tape drives at client sites. Some had failed mechanisms. Others lost the ability to write reliably. These were HP Ultrium 232, 448 and 460 drives. Most of these…
ewwhite
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7 answers

Is there still a place for tape storage?

We've backed up our data on LTO tapes for years and it's a real comfort to know we have everything on tape. A sister project and one of our data providers have both moved to 100% disk storage because the cost of disk has dropped so much. When we…
Jon Ericson
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4 answers

Determining LTO Cleaning Tape Expiration?

I have some LTO tape drives, and use cleaning tapes as required, but the lifetime of the cleaning tapes is not as predictable as I would have expected. I'm looking for a way to query the system, whether it be the robot (Quantum i6000) or Veritas…
Tim S.
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3 answers

Tape encryption management & best practices

I want to enable encryption on all of my backup tapes. I more-or-less know how to do this technically, but the procedural and human elements of implementing this are tricky. I use HP LTO4 drives with bacula, which doesn't have any key-management…
lukecyca
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5 answers

Determine remaining capacity of LTO tape

How can I determine how much space is remaining on an LTO tape? If I seek to the end and check the status, I can see I am on file number 17, but what I do not know is how large each file was. $ mt -f /dev/nst1 eod $ mt -f /dev/nst1 status SCSI 2…
Matt Clark
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4 answers

Why do companies still use tape drives?

I found this, but it doesn't really answer my question. Disks even in the 1-2 TB range are much cheaper than tapes, yet I saw that Google uses tape drives for backup. What is their (disks) primary disadvantage? I can imagine some sort of disk…
Corey Richardson
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2 answers

Do LTO tapes have spare/unused capacity?

As I understand it, LTO tapes write data in "wraps", where the first wrap unspools the tape into the drive, and the second wrap spools it back into the cartridge. This process is repeated a number of times, with the idea being that once the end of…
Malvineous
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4 answers

If LTO-3 full backup takes more than one tape. What is my next step hardware wise?

OK. some givens to factor in I use Backup Exec 12.x/13.x, Have server 2003/2008 environment including Exchange. I have Backup to Disk (Full/Diff) happening that is independent of the backup to LTO (Full/Diff). For more than one reason I'd rather not…
pplrppl
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4 answers

How to use the full LTO-2 Tape backup capacity of 200/400GB?

I have an Ultrium 448 tape drive, LTO-2 tapes (200/400GB) and I'm using HP Data Protector as the backup client. The system is set to format and overwrite all tapes but I never manage to get more that ~150GB on a tape before it asks for another tape…
Andrew Hoole
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2 answers

How do you monitor the performance of a character device (e.g. tape drive)?

There are many ways to monitor block device performance: dstat and iostat, heck, even sar will give you data on block device I/O rates. Unfortunately, I don't know of any good spur-of-the-moment tools for monitoring the performance of a character…
Slartibartfast
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2 answers

Linux LTO-4/5/6 Hardware AES Drive Encryption

For a number of reasons I have been trying to find a way to encrypt my backup tapes. I'm currently running Bacula for my backups and it's support for Drive based encryption is I have to call a script or something to set the key in the drive. How…
Squidly
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4 answers

Should static data be backed up every time to tape?

In the Backup and Recovery book, they write it is good practice to make a full backup every month, and then increments or differential back up each week. What if I have 800GB data and ~10GB changes per week. Should I still make a full backup each…
Sandra
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2 answers

Do I need to run a verfication on LTO tape backups even though the drives themselves perform verification as they write?

We have an LTO-3 Tape drive in a Dell media library that we use for our tape backups. The article about LTO on Wikipedia states that: LTO uses an automatic verify-after-write technology to immediately check the data as it is being written, but some…
Chris Magnuson
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What is "deduplication"?

I mean, I can look up the dictionary definition, but why is everyone suddenly talking about it in reference to virtual tape libraries? What's "new" here so that it's so much in the news lately?
lavinio
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