Tape Drives

[News Administrator]

Hi,

In the past I made backups using 3.5" floppys.  Needless to say, I wasn't
very good about making backups as it was very tedious shuffling all those
floppys.  A couple of weeks ago my system crashed and loading from backups
served no useful purpose as they were so out of date.

I'd like to install a tape drive hoping this will prevent a re-occurrence
of out-of-date backups.  I know nothing of tape units and I have several
questions.  I'm running AT&T SVR3.2 version 2.3 on a 386/20 with two 71MB
IDE hard drives.  The manuals I have, don't make any Tape Drive recomendations.

Questions:

	1.  The Operations/System Administration Guide says, "To install
	    from Cartridge Tape, the Cartridge Tape Controller must be
	    set at interrupt #5 and address range 288-289".  Are all tape
	    drive controllers set up for this?

	2.  I've seen adds in the Computer shopper stating that some tape
	    devices work using a port off the floppy controller.  If I
	    use this method and sacrifice a floppy disk, does the system
	    treat the tape drive as a floppy disk?  In other words will
	    'backup -c -d/dev/rdsk/f0q15d' work with this tape unit?

Any answers/recomendations would be greatly appreciated.  You can email
me at ...uunet!rushpc!jjr

thanks a ton
	  
-- 

John
----
Westminster Colorado	|
...uunet!rushpc!jjr