I came back from my Christmas holidays last Tuesday and none of my scheduled back-up has been done since December 23rd. I looked at my log and it said "Hardware failure" for all the missed jobs. I rebooted my machine and put another tape in the back-up unit (a Seagate Hornet 20GB, SCSI). Same strange noise and the tape can't be rewinded. I'll unmount it over the week-end to visually inspect it.
If I have to replace it, I'll look at 3 options:
A new tape back up: I am tempted by this new Travan 40GB from Seagate but it is not available in SCSI, just IDE. I do not have any IDE connector available in the machine where my current tape back-up is. I always liked the travan technology. I had a Colorado 250MB, then a Travan 4GB and now a 20GB. The Travan tapes I had were always reliable and affordably priced.
A 120GB removable hard drive: This would be the "easy" solution. I still have 2 WD1200JB drives lying around. I could put one in a removable tray and back-up on it nightly. I could easily write a couple of batch file to take care of the file copying from all my machines to this drive. I couldn't put this disk in the machine where my current tape back-up is but I could easily put it in my workstation having still 3 IDE connector available.
A tape auto-loader: That't the dream solution but I can't really afford it unless I get one from E-bay. But the problem with E-bay is that a lot of seller don't want to ship outside the USA. It sucks! There is life outside the USA! I looked at the Seagate one (Scorpion 240) and the HP (DAT 40x6). Any other brand you could suggest?
I'll be in Tokyo for almost three weeks starting next Monday. I'll take a day to shop in Akihabara. I'll see what I can find.
12:22:58 PM comment [] - See Also: WD1200JBUSAdat24x6
