+--- In our lifetime, mds46523@ggr.co.uk (Simmons Mr M D) wrote: | | Judicious snapshotting, decent DLT stackers directly attached to the filers and | a reliable admin host mean all but the one F540 (with 200GB totally filled) | easily backup overnight - the F540 finishes mid-morning.
We have found that snapshots make a wonderful alternative to single file restores. We have folks that update content for web sites 24x7 and there is a delta of about 2GB per day. So, after 2 weeks, 8 days and 6 hours of snapshots, we use quite a bit of space on this :)
As for stackers directly attached to the filers, what have folks found that works? When we first tried this (long ago with an ADIC DLT 2500xt "stacker"), we found that the stacker mechanism was quite lousy and tended to hang. Thus we had to reboot the filer to "un-hang" the stacker. I have stayed away from diretly connected drives since.
I would love to be able to attach a stacker back onto the filer.
Our main problem with single drives is that our filers are 2500 miles away and it is hard to coordinate tape swaps (should we have a single directly attached to the filer.
Alexei