Start looking or start saving?

[pentium]

After tons of fuss I finally decided to give in and get an older Compaq proliant 1600 server with four 9 gig drives and 256 mb ram.
With this new system I wanted to keep using my Ditto max professional drive with the ditto dash card for a little while longer.
Problem.
before windows 2000 was released, the ditto was discontinued and all support was dropped. This leaves me with no backup source at all. I herd mention of a third party driver and utility but I'm not 100% positive it's true. I'm also wondering if the tape drivers and utilities for NT 4.0 would work.
On the other hand, if this is the end of the line for the drive I do have a stack of 80GB native VS1 DLT tapes for a VS160 drive. The thing is, I have yet to see one of those drives go for under $50 yet (and don't expct it soon).

[shadow]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

After tons of fuss I finally decided to give in and get an older Compaq proliant 1600 server with four 9 gig drives and 256 mb ram.
With this new system I wanted to keep using my Ditto max professional drive with the ditto dash card for a little while longer.
Problem.
before windows 2000 was released, the ditto was discontinued and all support was dropped. This leaves me with no backup source at all. I herd mention of a third party driver and utility but I'm not 100% positive it's true. I'm also wondering if the tape drivers and utilities for NT 4.0 would work.
On the other hand, if this is the end of the line for the drive I do have a stack of 80GB native VS1 DLT tapes for a VS160 drive. The thing is, I have yet to see one of those drives go for under $50 yet (and don't expct it soon).

I seriously doubt that the Windows NT drivers would work on Windows 2000 however the software may work. After a quick search on google, I found a page that may be of some interest to you. The link is:

http://www.driverforum.com/tapebackup3/393.html

I will copy the parts that were of interest.

--------------------------
I had talked to Iomega about the software they provide, They won't help you out with it, but if you want, you can use the win95/98 software. It runs on windows Me, XP (most likely 2000, since XP is built on it) i use a ditto easy 3200 external, and bought 2 DittoMax external drives. These are nice units for 17 bucks each at geeks.com (sory, I bought the last 2)
--------------------------
Hi,
i had the same problem when I changed from win98 to w2k.
Now I solved the problem by using a DittoDashDXJ card.
This is not a PnP-card. I got the card from Iomega Service. It was
designed for Windows NT.
You have to do the settings for IRQ, DMA and IO-Port manually by Jumpers.
I.E. IRQ=5, DMA=3, IO =360. Bios settings for IRQ and DMA have to be ISA.
After installing the Ditto Software, the drive will be recognized
automatically. If not, you can add the controller with the correct
settings manually. After this the drive is recognized and the Backup-Program
works without any problem.
Important: In the System Monitor Window of W2k the controller and the drive are not
shown.
Good luck!
Juergen
--------------------------

You have said that you have the Ditto Dash Card, however I am not sure whether this is the same as the "DittoDashDXJ card" which is the card used to solve the problem. The main confusion here is that apparently with this setup, Windows does not require a driver, and that the software handles the communication to the Ditto Dash card. I am not sure if this is even possible or whether this will work. You can only try I guess.

If that fails, I have a spare HP DAT 24 SCSI Tape Drive that you may want to buy off me. HP support is pretty darn good, drivers are available all the way up to Windows 2003 as well as the HP Tape Tools software. Windows 2000 and up already have a driver on the install CD. However it stores 24 gigabytes of data compressed. Nothing like the VS160 drive which stores 80 gigabytes natively!

[Topcat]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

What exactly do you plan to do with this server? My first suggestion would be to ditch the tape all together and run RAID mirror arrays for data security. For off-server archiving, just RAR everything up and burn it onto DVD's or CD's. If the data is too large for DVD's, run another small backup server, accessible only over your LAN, and run a RAID in that, mirroring the master server. Tapes are old, slow, undersized, and very unreliable forms of data security these days.

[shadow]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

What exactly do you plan to do with this server? My first suggestion would be to ditch the tape all together and run RAID mirror arrays for data security. For off-server archiving, just RAR everything up and burn it onto DVD's or CD's. If the data is too large for DVD's, run another small backup server, accessible only over your LAN, and run a RAID in that, mirroring the master server. Tapes are old, slow, undersized, and very unreliable forms of data security these days.

RAID mirror arrays are always great! However I personally would not use DVD's for off server archiving, just about all the discs that I burn do not last. I think they develop bad sectors or something because after some time they become harder and harder to read until eventually certain areas of the disc just become completely unreadable (For example an archive that I made two years ago has one or two sectors that are completely unreadable now and many that are hard to read but not unreadable). However I am not sure if this is caused by the burner or the discs that I am using (or both). Surprisingly I have never had such problems with CD's, even after five years they all read wonderfully.

Having said that, it would be perfectly feasible if the backup does not need to last for more than one to two years.

Anyway, I do agree that tapes are old and are relatively undersized in comparison to modern hard drives. However I disagree with it being unreliable. I have always found them to be very reliable, only thing that I can think of that kills them are changing magnetic waves. So do not vacuum the room filled with tapes! However another disadvantage that I see with tapes is that they are relatively expensive to buy (new that is). Many are also SCSI, and everything SCSI seems to be 5x more expensive than anything else.

[pentium]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

Topcat, you are forgetting:
Compared to you I don't have money. The system was free, If I were to ditch the ditto I will want to use my cheapest alternative. In this case, a drive for my five VS160 DLT tapes I got for free.

I think I just like stuff that whirrs.

And shadow, I have the PNP version of the ditto dash.

[pentium]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

Now that I think about it, Topcat's right.
It's going to be a waste of time attempting to get the ditto drive properly setup.
Nevermind everyone.

[shadow]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

I too understand the pain of being poor.

I have thought of another solution that may be feasible as well. If you have an old PC lying around (like I do, I am thinking about posting them in the "For Sale" section of this website) is to install Windows NT 4 on that and use the Ditto drive on that PC. That way you could have a main server doing all the stuff you wish and a small backup server. I am not sure how flexible the Iomega software is with respect to backing up over a network, however you should be able to use any backup software since the drivers would be installed. It could be done in such a way that your main server will wake up the backup server (via. WOL) at night or whenever and schedule a backup to be done and shutdown afterwards.

I think that would be neat, however a spare PC is needed. As well as a network card which has a working WOL.

[Topcat]

Re: Start looking or start saving?

Being poor and addicted to computers is a bad combination, and very frustrating.... Trust me, I've been there before. I sometimes forget that when devising solutions.... lol

My revised recommendation would be to just get an external HDD or thumb drive. Surely that server has USB ports (if not, a USB2.0 card is only 20 bucks). We could go on all day about the reliability of tapes, I've had both good and bad experiences with them, but an external hdd would be a better solution over tapes IMO. On top of that, like tapes, the backups will be stored off-server with an ext drive, so if the server is ever compromised, your backups aren't.