How many tapes do you manage? If the number is under 50 to 100 (depending
on how much you like manual recordkeeping), you can manage that many tapes
by hand. Beyond that number, the effort becomes overwhelming. That is
where the barcode reader becomes a near necessity.
As long as all your tapes fit into the library and you never take them out
of the library unit, then you probably don't need barcodes or a barcode
reader.
But, if you do the sensible thing, sending some subset of your tapes offsite
for disaster recovery purposes, then the barcodes become necessary to ensure
that you and/or Amanda can then reload the library without having to reread
every tape on reinsertion into the library. I encourage you to consider
getting the barcode reader, if nothing else than to encourage you to keep
some of your tapes offsite and to set up good storage management habits.
Don
Donald L. (Don) Ritchey
E-mail: Donald.Ritchey AT exeloncorp DOT com
-----Original Message-----
From: Fran Fabrizio [mailto:fran AT cis.uab DOT edu]
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 9:55 AM
To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Barcode readers: how important?
I'm newly entering the area of large-scale backup operations, and I have
an option to add a barcode reader to our tape library system that we
will be ordering (Qualstar TLS-5433 SAIT). I'm wondering how important
it is to have a barcode reader on the tape library? The way I
understand it (shaky, at best) is that Amanda writes a label to the
front of each tape, and that if you have barcodes on your tapes, it
maintains a mapping table between the two. Seems like an extra step to
me, so the barcodes must have some benefit from a human-convenience
point of view, as opposed to Amanda itself. Frankly, I'd rather not
spend the money as long as I don't regret it later. Thoughts?
Thanks,
Fran
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