Got it on ebay. There are great deals to be had if one knows the technology, partly because there are very few of us left now who know it, so extremely expensiv

Got it on ebay. There are great deals to be had if one knows the technology, partly because there are very few of us left now who know it, so extremely expensive equipment goes for pennies on the dollar. I use self-system engineered (read: self OS packaged) Bacula software for backups with a custom developed shell program which interfaces with Oracle RMAN to do backups. I use Solaris 10 on sparc, which also goes for pennies on the dollar nowadays since there are few of us left who understand how to run it and even fewer who understand how to squeeze the most out of that hardware + software combination. The tape library shows up as character and block files under /dev/rmt/ and the robotic arm with the barcode scanner under /dev/changer/, nothing special or fancy about it. There is another piece of freeware I compiled and packaged (whose name I forgot) which controls the robot arm and the scanner, also by issuing standard SCSI commands to /dev/changer/ files, nothing fancy or special about it. The tape library has enough capacity for full backups with three month retention policy, so the only thing I have to do is replace a worn out tape cartridge roughly once in three years. Backups are daily. The entire solution ran me around $800 (server + differential SCSI controller + tape library) and the tapes ran me $500, over the span of 12 years.