[clarkgoble]

Hi, I have a HP Colorado T4000 I inherited and was wondering how hard that would be to get working with OSX. Since it is just a tape drive, I'd imagine that a cheap SCSI card or Firewire->SCSI cable should suffice for speed.

The big question is how well OSX supports this. Will it work with the Unix utilities or do I have to buy some backup program?

Has anyone successfully used a SCSI tape with OSX?

Thanks.

[clarkgoble]

OK after doing a lot of searching of the Darwin lists and other resources here's the scoop for anyone interested. (I figured I'm not the only one with the question)

There are no real solutions beyond a project over at Source Forge. It is still in the very early stages though.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/darwin-tape/

Apple has no plans to develop tape drivers. I personally think this is a BIG mistake. A lot of people use tapes heavily. With XServe being pushed by Apple this is a mistake. Yeah there is DVD. However tapes really do have their place. I'm not sure this decision to ignore tapes is wise in the least.

Personally I think it would be nice if Apple pushed this a bit.

[drjoe]

Retrospect supports all sorts of tape drives under OS X. I have a Sony DAT identified as
"SDT-2000" and correctly identifies the scsi ID #. If you go to Dantz's web site you can root about and find out if your particular device is supported.

[residentEvil]

yup...i'm using it (retrospect) to support an HP surestore dat drive. simple scsi card in QS. course, its an older card so you get that 'card doesn't support deep sleep crap', but so what? i leave mine on all the time.

[clarkgoble]

Thanks for the info. I didn't think of checking that as I was thinking of using it with the native Unix utilities.

How scriptable is Retrospect? I saw that it was scriptable. I'd like to have a lot of my own control over what gets backed up and when.