Tape backup drives: A reminiscence

A random post on a vintage computer group, and a find while cleaning out a closet, reminded me of a bit of my computing history: Travan tape drives. These were relatively inexpensive back when hard drives and removable media were not, and had (compressed, claimed) capacity more or less sufficient to do a full system backup of the multi-user Linux systems I was running. The drives we used hooked up via the floppy interface; the kernel had built-in support for these ftape mechanisms, but typically required a kernel build. (Spent a lot of time compiling kernels in the mid-90s.) The last one we deployed was an Exabyte Eagle TR-3, with 1600 MB (~1.6 GB) uncompressed capacity (claimed 3200 MB compressed capacity), which, nowdays, is smaller than the smallest thumb drive I have handy, but back then, was the /home directories, email, webpages, etc., for a community of more than a hundred people. (When I left, we’d just upgraded the main server to a software RAID mirroring 2x 10 GB UDMA IDE hard drives, and no longer had a tape drive installed.)

Exabyte Eagle TR-3 floppy tape drive

Had almost forgotten about that chapter ... Apparently, the drives we were using were targeted at personal computers (Wikipedia article on QIC backuips), which tracks, our budget was decidedly tilted towards “consumer grade” hardware. Alright, nostalgia trip over, back to work...