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I have equipped myself with an LTO-5 tape drive, and some tapes to avoid data loss, having previously relied on RAID.

However, I realise that even a gigabit Ethernet is not fast enough to drive an LTO-5 drive directly - it's constantly stopping and starting, which I understand is no good for the tape.

My current thoughts are that I'll have to backup the other servers over the network to the server with the tape drive, and subsequently backup the "backups" filesystem to tape.

Is there a better way, without buying commercial backup software?

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    Care to share the code that writes to the LT05? It's been a long time since I used tape but my strongest memory is having to get the blocksize right. Have you considered solutions such as Bacula? Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 7:27
  • Check if the tape buffer has been turned off accidentally. On Linux, type mt drvbuffer 1 to turn it back on. Additionally, try to use 10G ethernet. Commented Dec 30, 2019 at 15:19

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First, I glad that you realized that that raid is not the same as backup. Seconded, you might want to look into something like bacula as a backup agent that might be able to efficiently use your tape drive. Bacula can be set up to cache to disk, then write to tape eliminating the shoeshing problem of inefficient writes.

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