Backing up optical platters

[Anthony Hardwick]

We have a customer with two full jukeboxes of platters of varying densities. They have about 100 or so volumes off-line and are regularly pulling them in and out. There are currently no back ups of the platters and I am worried that all the handling of the platters will lead to irreperable damage of individual platters and permanently lost data. This is an imaging application, the OS is HP-UX 10.20 and the Jukebox management software is Plexus Storage Manager and Informix 7.x as the database. Does it make sense to back the platters up to tape? Or is there (ideally) a program/utility/device that can duplicate the platters while off-line and still preserve all the mounting and volume information...?

[Eric de Lange_2]

A lot of the professional packages out there have the abillity to duplicate platters/volumes. Some make 1 copy, some make 2. I would check with your software vendor if your app has this feature. The advantage of this feature is that your application knows where to find a copy of the data automatically.

Backing up to tape is an option bit it would be my guess that this will be a time consuming process.

Best regards,

Cal.