I'm researching a tape drive + backup software to work across my unix/linux network. Was thinking about a dds4 tape drive (sony's) on my solaris ultra2, with some kind of software that would work across the network to back up my other 2 solaris boxes, plus my 2 linux boxes. What do others use for software? I have to keep this under 1500 (boss gave me a budget). The dds4 tape drive i had in mind tho uses ultra scsi, i have 68 pin fast/wide scsi on my ultra2. Will ultra scsi work with the fast/wide scsi? What software would work to help automate the backups across different platforms? Trying to figure out what others use, our corporate uses a tape loader and does incremental backups every few minutes, but I'm not looking for that high end of backups. Just a daily where I could use one tape per system kind of thing.
The DDS4 drive should work, but of course, it won't be as fast as it could be with the UltraWide controller. I believe that I have ran a similiar setup of an UltraWide device on old SCSI-II bus with a 50 to 68 pin adapter. I have also ran a Ultra160 10,000 RPM 18 gig SCSI drive on my 2940UW controller. It works, but I don't get all the Ultra160 bandwidth which really cripples the drives performance (Imagine my surprise when my ATA100 drives were outrunning my uberfast spinning drive. Sure, the head seek was heckuva lot faster than my IDEs, but the data throughput was really disapointing...)
As for software, I would take a look at Amanda. It is built for backing up over a network of several machines.
I cannot figure out how to set up amanda, driving me nuts. Is there a good site that shows step by step. I have it on my linux box, configured, installed, etc, but can't figure out all the conf stuff, there's so much and its spread out all over the directories.
Here is one website that I got from Google: http://www.frankenlinux.com/guides/amandaserver.html
I have also seen articles in SysAdmin magazine on setting up amanda (don't have 'em on me at the moment. Someplace back at the house, I reckon).