Two-tape No-hands Backup systems available?

[Tim Jones]

Interesting that you ask this because BRU is quite capable of cascading drives like this. We’ve not included that feature within BRU PE’s GUI, but the BRU I/O engine that drives it is capable of this and is something that some of our larger research customers use. For example, you could issue this command line in a terminal:

bru -cvvvf ntape0 -f ntape1 -f ntape2 -f ntape3 -b 2m -L “Large Job Cascade – 4 drives” /Volumes/Array/Folder

BRU would then write to the 1st drive, fill it, move to the 2nd, fill it and continue through to the 4th drive – only prompting for additional tapes after filling the 4th (then restarting on the 1st).

If you get stumped and are comfortable with the command line, give our team a call to discuss it further.

Tim
—
Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

[Martin Greenwood]

With two LTO drives and our YoYottaID LTFS software you can either span across two tapes or make two copies of the same material in parallel.
Both these functions are setup from the GUI and are unattended plus if there is internet you will get an email telling you when the backup is complete.
With LTO-7 you can fit 5.7TB onto one tape in a quicker time (writing is faster) than LTO-5 or LTO-6.
The LTO-7 drive will also read+write LTO-6 and read LTO-5.
YoYottaID LTFS also supports the brand new LTO-8 drive which stores 8.5TB or 11.4TB per tape depending on the media used.
So you may just need one drive. Regardless of which approach we recommend that you create two tape copies if the original material is going to be deleted.

Best,

Martin Greenwood

CTO

YoYotta