Seagate Tape Drives

[boomerang]

Anyone have any experience with these? I need an inexpensive replacement for a dead Onstream drive. It's a small office with three computers. Very little to backup. An IDE interface is ideal.

And before anyone brings it up, I need an automated setup. These ladies will put in a tape and take it back out and no more. Backing up to CDR will not work with this group. I know, I'm married to one of them!

 

[mcveigh]

I used an external seagate usb@.0 tape drive a few months ago, it's a little tedious to set things up and to search through backups. this was for a dentist's office with 2pc's, the included retrospect software is what I used to keep costs down. works fine though

 

[boomerang]

Hey, thanks for the info.

I'm going to need internal, IDE interface. Should be essentially the same. I had looked around some here. Looks like there are numerous versions. As long as they can put a tape in every morning and remove it in the afternoon with the backup completed automatically, it will work.

 

[MysticLlama]

Here's an idea, I don't know if it will work in your situation, but it's something to think about.

Lots of older servers had SCSI DAT drives (I have some in my old Compaqs) and they are complete workhorses, I have one that we've been backing up on every day for about 5 years, and just a cleaning tape once a week or so and no issues at all.

You could get one of these off of eBay and a SCSI card pretty cheap I'd imagine, and it will be supported by all kinds of softare, is easy to get tapes for, and should run faster with other things running in the background than it would on IDE.

*Actually I just looked real quick and I have a 12/24 I can pull from a server if you want to go the SCSI route. (I go to disk then to an autoloader now, so I don't use the individual ones. This one also was used twice, maybe three times I believe.)

The other option I'd suggest if you don't have to have tape, is a USB Hard Drive. If you get a couple of them, you can take them off site easy enough, and backups to them are very fast (if you have USB2.0, I guess 1.1 would be a bit tedious) I have 3 2.5" ones and a 3.5" one now and I use them all constantly, they are extremely handy.

 

[boomerang]

Well I appreciate the offer. But SCSI will be difficult to implement for several reasons, none of which I am happy about.

In no particular order;

Money is tight right now which means we must continue to run the system as configured. With a Video card, RAID card, Modem, and NIC, there are only two slots left. And with the #1 slot sharing with the AGP slot, it's near impossible to find a card that will work in there. That leaves one PCI slot free. And it shares with the #4 slot. well, I'm sure you remember those fun times.

The kicker is, the system is still running 98SE which makes IRQ problems a big consideration. I spent a considerable amount of time swapping cards to minimize IRQ problems . The NIC is the worst offender of the lot. Very picky IRQ wise. And we are stuck with 98 until she can pick up new software to run the business as she is still running DOS based software.

I have actually picked up all the copies of XP Pro we need, and although there may be a solution out there to print from DOS in XP, I'm not interested in doing that at this time.

The mobo is running a PIII 800 which of course means no USB 2.0. Of course a card could be put in except for the above mentioned issues.

We're whittling away a little at a time at this picking up this and that in anticipation of the big switch. We're not there yet and see no rainbow in sight.

It's a small business and times are tough right now. That's why I was asking about the seagate drives. They're inexpensive.

So now you know more than you probably wanted to.

I appreciate the advice, I really do. Thanks.

 

[MysticLlama]

Ah, I see how it is now, you're between a rock and a hard place, inside a trash compactor.

So here are a few more questions, just to get an idea about the whole thing...

You're worried about printing from DOS in XP, because it's a DOS based app. I have this same problem with our archaic UNIX software here, no newer printer support. Can you attach it to a network printer though?

If you're just running 98SE, then a cheap Seagate drive is probably your best bet. How much data are you looking at backing up?

Have you thought about one of those all in one network drives/print servers/etc.? Maybe that could kill a couple of birds with one stone, and help along the migration to XP?

Maybe if it's not a lot of data you could use something like a zip or jaz drive hooked up to parallel. (yuck, but just thinking of options)