backing up several machines to one tape?

[kmp@harlequin.com]

    Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 20:46 EDT
    From: K. Mark Alexander <kma@samson.cadr.amis.com>

    ... The real question is: How do you retrieve from a specific hosts' lmfs
    backup dump?

Speaking of "how do you retrieve", I recently contemplated buying an
exabyte drive for my Macivory and was independently warned by several
people that (in their opinion) exabyte is a terrible medium in which to
do backups.  The word I got is that people have found it to have
higher-than-average risk of not being able to retrieve data from at all,
and that it's especially bad in the case where you're reusing the same
tape over and over (as one would presumably do with incrementals).  I
didn't try it myself, so this is third-hand info at best, but it's worth
actually checking some of your exabyte backups before you are desperate
for them to convince yourself that they're really storing your data in a
retrievable way.  Personally, I wish smbx would provide support for DAT
drives, which are more popular, more widely available, much cheaper, and
reputed to be more reliable.