Re: Any experience with these autochangers?

Bill Arlofski via Bacula-users <[email protected]> Fri, 28 Mar 2025 20:18:58 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.bacula.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 3/28/25 11:55 AM, Dan Langille wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2025, at 12:50 PM, Edheldil wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> we plan to upgrade our current tape backup (2x LTO-6 in Dell PowerVault
>> 114X) and we were looking into
>> either Dell EMC ML3 or HPE StoreEver MSL2024, both with LTO-9 drives.
>> Unfortunately the vendors are
>> unwilling to lease them to us for testing.
>>
>> We use Bacula community edition on Debian.
>>
>> Does anyone have an experience with those libraries? I have found
>> MSL2024 mentioned in Bacula wiki,
>> https://gitlab.bacula.org/bacula-community-edition/bacula-community/-/wikis/Hardware%20Results
>> but that record seems to be years old, so I am not sure how relevant it
>> is.
> 
> FWIW: for changers, it's all about scripting.  You may have to create / modify
> your changer script, however, that is relatively straight forward.
> 
> As to the particular tape drive, it's LTO - it should just work.
> --
>    Dan Langille
>    [email protected]


In addition to what Dan wrote, here's a snippet I usually just cut-n-paste to my sales reps and customers when they ask a 
similar question:
----8<----
Bacula does not need any special drivers to operate tape libraries or drives.

If the tape drive is presented by the kernel as a '/dev/st<x>' node, and can be controlled with the standard Linux 'mt' 
utility, and the Tape Library is presented by the kernel as a '/dev/sg<x>' node, and can be managed by the Linux 'mtx' 
utility, there should be no problems at all.

Please see the Storage Resource section of the main manual to see how to configure the Storage Daemon's 'Autochanger' and 
'Device' resources here:

https://docs.baculasystems.com/BETechnicalReference/StorageDaemon/StorageDaemonResourceTypes/AutochangerResource/index.html#autochanger-resource
----8<----

That has held true for me in the 20+ years I have been working with Bacula Community, and 10+ years working for Bacula 
Systems. :)


Best regards,
Bill


-- 
Bill Arlofski
[email protected]

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