SCSI Tape Drives and Retrospect/Other backup solutions

[britboyj]

So my sister's girlfriend is a professional photographer. Her former consultant get her an SCSI 68-pin connected Sony StorMaster tape drive that backs up her 3 big NAS drives with all her work via EMC Retrospect. This was on a PowerMac G5 tower with an SCSI 68-pin card installed.

She's moving and has tasked me with getting it all up and running again at her new place since she's fallen out with the old consultant (who did some weird, weird stuff with their network - why are there 3 switches for the NAS? Why does the Airport run through two of them? WTF?) and gotten an iMac 27" i7.

Now, problem is, obviously that her i7 has no way of plugging into that SCSI tape drive. She's been using her G5 PURELY to run Retrospect which is a waste of space and energy. Plus she's moving to a much smaller space, so I really, really want to get it out of there.



So here's the thing - I CANNOT find a 68-pin SCSI to USB adapter other than one by Ratoc, which apparently only lets the tape drive function in "mass storage mode" which doesn't really tell me if it will work with Retrospect or not. IS THERE ANOTHER SOLUTION to keep the current tape drive and plug it into the iMac?

Please, please please help me out here guys! Thanks!

 

[davidmorgen19]

You did not use SCSI Tape Drives in i7.for data backup you need to connect your driev with your Mac pc backup your data and transfer in to your I7 through LAN cable.

 

[britboyj]

You did not use SCSI Tape Drives in i7.for data backup you need to connect your driev with your Mac pc backup your data and transfer in to your I7 through LAN cable.

I'm going to assume English is not your first language.

What WAS happening: PowerMac G5 backed up through SCSI card to SCSI tape drive.

What needs to happen: i7 iMac backs up to SCSI tape drive through adapter. Getting rid of the G5 entirely is number one priority.

 

[smithrh]

I know this isn't the reply you're looking for, but do you really want to stay with tape? Clearly it's causing you issues in trying to find an adapter, it's just going to get worse with time, IMO.

If you're wise with your choices and setup, you could easily get a dozen of so TB supported on the iMac in a reasonable footprint. Right now I have 4 TB supported in a SW raid configuration on a mini fileserver with TM backup and I don't think I'd have any issue doubling that.

Recovery of files via TM is not only by the TM utility itself but the filesystem on the backup disks is easy to navigate to grab files manually if one needs to do that.

I've archived entire libraries by simply copying them to a HD and then locking that HD away. If you want to be paranoid, do it twice and put the other HD in another physical location.


Edit: are you sure about the spelling of that tape drive? I couldn't get a single hit on Google for it, even trying some combinations. If it's SCSI, I'd be very concerned that it's not supported any more, even by the manufacturer. I used DAT and 4MM tape backup 20 years ago, I hope that this drive isn't that old.

HD is cheap now - 2TB for $200. I don't see a good future for tape, to be honest - and trying to integrate SCSI into the mix doesn't help things.