Anyone using a tape drive under OS X

[bunnspecial]

I've recently found myself in possession of an external SCSI tape drive along with a BIG stack of media for it(I found in a computational chemistry lab clean out, which has yielded a lot of interesting stuff).

In any case, since my most-used Quicksilver already has a SCSI card with the correct interface in it, and I have probably 50 tapes, I figure I have nothing to lose by at least trying it out.

The drive uses HP DDS-1 tapes, which, from what I can find are 90m each and are 2gb/4gb.

I'm just curious as to what actually using this as a backup device would entail. Would I need a special program to "talk" to the tape drive, or is there a built-in Apple utility that I could use.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this.

 

[tampasteve]

I have read that you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup to tape drives, but I have never done it....

 

[gooser]

there are just better and cheaper ways these days.

 

[bunnspecial]

there are just better and cheaper ways these days.

What is cheaper than something for which I already have the equipment and media?

I have read that you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup to tape drives, but I have never done it....

Thanks, I'll try that. I don't have the drive hooked up yet, but am planning on doing so this evening.

 

[Hrududu]

Retrospect can do tape drives. I'm not sure what the last PPC version was. I haven't used the software since Time Machine came out.

 

[weckart]

I used an Iomega Ditto drive back in the day. That had tapes with capacities identical to DDS-1 and I used Retrospect under OS/2 for backups. Slow but did the job.

Still have a Sony SDT-9000 sitting in a box with plenty of tapes.