Hi,

I've been using Amanda for ages, but the data volume I'm trying to back
up has grown, and I'm looking for a new tape drive. Currently, I'm using
an internal SCSI Quantum DLT7000, 35Gb native, with Amanda 2.4.2p2 on
Debian Woody. Filesystems are all XFS, backed up with xfsdump.

The tape server machine is currently supposed to be backing up 3 other
machines, and that may grow to 4 in the near future. Largest single
filesystem is 70Gb (compressed image of this fs currently at 27Gb), and
I'm currently getting close to the tape capacity on occasions. I have
two Amanda configs - a weekly cycle with 15 tapes, and a yearly
"archive" cycle, with twelve, which gets all level 0 backups. This no
longer fits on the tape...

I've had a brief look at various drives, and I'm basically considering
SuperDLT, LTO/Ultrium, or AIT. AIT seems the most cost effective, but
I've never been a great fan of Sony's "standards"...  The HP Ultrium
drives seem not too unreasonable for the 100Gb native capacity, whereas
SuperDLT drives seem rather more pricey. Cost is an issue for us, so I'm
primarily looking at single drives rather than libraries.

So, does anyone have any suggestions, good (or bad) experiences, or
other advice? Reliability is obviously by far the most important
thing... I'm also curious as to whether people favour internal or
external drives?

Any/all opinions would be much appreciated.

Mike.