For most efficient backups with Stratesave, following backup equipment is recommended:
SCSI DAT, DLT, 8mm drives. These drives are feature rich, reliable, and have good Windows NT/2000/XP drivers available. Tape drives which are cheaper than those listed are not recommended, even if they seem to have good characteristics. There are some features which are not seen on the data sheets, but which are important for organized backups. The listed drives have all of the following: Support of varying and fixed size tape blocks, the ability to make tape moves anywhere any number of blocks or files forwards or backwards, the ability to write anywhere or at a filemark on the tape after a tape move, early warning zone near the end of the tape, a good Windows NT/2000/XP tape driver, which reports tape errors back to the calling software program and has a SCSI pass through interface.
These features are all used by Stratesave. Stratesave may also work with the cheaper tape drives which don't have all of this. But it can't overcome all tape drive limitations, which results in limitations for the user (it can't append backups on tape for some drives, or can't extend backups over multiple tapes on some others). Some tape drives also report good status back to the Software after every tape-write operation, even when they could not write. Stratesave's backup check with checksum or file compare is especially necessary for those drives. In short: Stratesave does its best to work with any tape drive, for which there is a Windows driver. But for maximum performance and flexibility, one of the listed drive types is recommended.
But for backups with any tape drive, it is recommended to make backup check with checksum or filecompare after every backup. This will reread the entire backup, to assure that the backed up data is correctly stored on the tape. It also finds data errors which are caused by SCSI bus problems, which a tape drive internal immediate reread can't detect.
Best is a drive which is data underrun-safe (e.g. burn proof or others), supports packet-writing and includes driver Software like DirectCD, PacketCD or other, which assigns a drive letter to the drive ans makes it behave similar to a standard removable disk or floppy drive. Data underruns, temporary interrupt of data flow for the CD-writer can occur during backup, especially network backups. If the drive can't handle them there is the chance that the CD gets defective.
See also: Backup to CD-ROM / DVD-RAM
Stratesave network backup with Network agent allows backups of remote systems, without installing Software on the backup clients. Stratesave is only run on the backup server. Stratesave uses Windows Networking for Backing up Remote computers. To backup Windows and NTFS specialities of Windows 2003/XP/2000/NT 4 remote computers, Windows XP Professional is recommended Backup Server (or Windows 2003).
See also: Network backup with Stratesave