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Tape backup drive recommendations

V

Vincent

Platinum Member
I'm planning to buy a tape backup drive for my home system and am looking for recommendations.

I only need to back up 20-30GB of stuff. The products I've looked at are:

1) Travan 10/20GB drives. There seem to be two kinds of these, a basic model and an "NS20" model with hardware compression and "read while write" verifying capabilities. Anyone have comments about these drives? Are the more advanced features useful? Tecmar and Tandberg seem to make the cheapest versions of these drives. Is it worth it to pay more for an HP or a Seagate? Does SCSI vs. IDE make a difference? I already have a SCSI card.

2) Onstream 15/30GB digital tape drives. I read one review that praised these drives, but I don't want to make an investment in a proprietary standard like this unless it is much better than the alternative. Has anyone had experiences with these drives?

3) There are also some other digital tape drives but these exceed my $400-500 budget.

Thanks.
 
I have a Seagate TapeStor NS20 10/20GB IDE and they are pretty nice. It takes about 4 hours to backup one tape worth of data so I usually set backups to run overnight. As for noise, the travans have always been loud compared to DATs and DLTs. If you computer is in you bedroom, the sound of backup could cause some sleepless nights. I don't think backups are any faster with the SCSI version. Price for media is decne tat about $30 a pop for 3M/Imation tapes.

What exactly are you planning on backing up? Most of my stuff is already zipped or highly compressed so I only get about 10.5 - 11GB per tape. I don't have any experience with the OnStream drives but the higher capacity might be better for you. I went with the Travan because I ran out of 5.25 inch bays and needed a drive take could fit into a 3.5".

Its good that you are thinking of backup. Most people don't consider it until it is too late.

Windogg
 
Seagate TapeStor Travan 20GB EIDE here. I was more impressed with this drive than I thought I'd be. Coming from a high speed removable disk backup solution I really dreaded going back to tape. But the IDE bandwidth helps (compared to earlier QIC tape drives running off floppy).

The bundled backup software is good but I wish it gave estimates on remaining free space. It is loud but not unbearably so. The retail box includes a tape and I believe it was $220 from Onvia when I bought it.

One definite tip: avoid the Onstream models. I've talked with retailer techs and these things have reliability problems (with the units themselves...carts are another issue). The reviews are all great but they never do "second looks" so you can't judge reliability from reviews. Plus I think they're discontinuing the current line in favor of USB or fireware or something (not sure on that).

Digital tape drives....all I know is they're pricey. 🙂
 
Thanks for the responses. I have 23GB of hard drive space, but I'm only using a third of it. Some of the files are compressed. So I doubt I'll get anywhere near 20GB per tape.

I've been using my CDRW for backups for the past year, but I'm getting tired of swapping discs and media errors that force me to start all over again.

Yeah, for my 486 I used an IBM Easy Options QIC-80 tape drive that ran off the floppy controller and stored 80MB per tape. I was playing around with it several months ago--it was slow like you wouldn't believe.

I'll probably buy it from Onvia if I can make a decision soon because I want to use the $25 coupon that expires Monday.
 
You've probably thought this all through already, but have you thought of using another hard drive as a backup. I have a 2nd HDD in my case that I back up to periodically. Normally it is disconnected to protect agaist viruses. I simply turn off the PC, reconnect the drive, backup, disconnect the drive and reboot. There are available removable HDD caddies of some sort too, for added security. Big fast drives are very cheap these days, and if it's just for backups you can get a slow one even cheaper. Works for me anyway.
 
Dude, I can sell you an external 10/20 gig DLT tape backup with 6 tapes and a cleaning tape. This drive is SCSI and works great. Its fast and quiet. It works natively with windows NT/2000. It will work with win9x if you have the right software (Novastor, Arcserve for 9x)
These drives are almost 100% reliable. I never had a bad tape or restore. Let me know if you are interested. The manufacturer is Quantum (I think all DLTs are Quantum). I could sell it for 350US.
 
I've got the Seagate Travan 10/20 NS (scsi), and I gotta say, I agree with Ulysses. If I had to do it again today, given the price of very fast and large IDE hard drives, I'ld just back up to a hard drive. Restoring from a tape can be slow. And what's really a pain is if you lose your catalog, and have to reconstruct it from the tape. Ouch, that takes forever! (Of course better having that than nothing.) You can use most backup software to backup to a hard drive (creates a big file), or else just do a copying thing. You can either leave the HD in the system, or use one of those removeable caddies. The way to go, IMHO.
 
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