From: Bryan R. <br...@za...> - 2003-08-22 08:11:27
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Greetings all, I know this topic has been discussed in the past, but I have a few questions that I wasn't able to find an answer to in the archives. BackupPC is working great as a short term (1 month) backup solution. We would like to create long-term archives to tapes. Here's what I'd like to do: Backup a snapshot of the files from one machine (that are currently stored in the pool), and save it to tape. I know you can execute a command line to pull out a tar file, and then write it to a tape, but does anyone have any suggestions for what if the tar file is larger than the tape? What utilities will break the tar across multiple tapes? Is it possible to send out an alert (via email, pager or whatever) when it's time to switch tapes? Also, what if there is a bad spot on the tape, with tar files isn't everything after that point unretrievable? Any advice, greatly appreciated. Thanks, Bryan |
From: Steve W. <swa...@ls...> - 2003-08-23 00:02:36
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On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 02:12 PM, Bryan Ragon wrote: > Greetings all, > I know this topic has been discussed in the past, but I have a few > questions that I wasn't able to find an answer to in the archives. > BackupPC > is working great as a short term (1 month) backup solution. We would > like > to create long-term archives to tapes. Here's what I'd like to do: > > Backup a snapshot of the files from one machine (that are currently > stored > in the pool), and save it to tape. I know you can execute a command > line to > pull out a tar file, and then write it to a tape, but does anyone have > any > suggestions for what if the tar file is larger than the tape? What > utilities will break the tar across multiple tapes? Is it possible to > send > out an alert (via email, pager or whatever) when it's time to switch > tapes? > Also, what if there is a bad spot on the tape, with tar files isn't > everything after that point unretrievable? > > Any advice, greatly appreciated. > > > Thanks, > Bryan Basically what you're wanting is a tape based backup server solution. In many cases, this is going to be VERY expensive. I backup several servers to an AIT based tape library. For a few years I was running a home-grown backup solution written in /bin/sh that would load/unload the proper tape in a drive, run various ufsdump backups (Solaris systems), load the next tape if it was fulls, rinse/lather/repeat... I finally abandoned this home-grown solution when I had a single filesystem that wouldn't fit on a single AIT-1 tape (about 55 GB of data). I went ahead and purchased Veritas NetBackup. Be warned, this is an expensive program, although it does a great job at managing the tape backup process. ufsdump does have the ability to span tapes, but I didn't particularly feel like trying to hash something together with Expect or whatever else I would need to get a backup solution running. The documentation for BackupPC mentions the following tape backup programs: Three popular open source packages that do tape backup are Amanda (http://www.amanda.org), afbackup (http://sourceforge.net/projects/afbackup), and Bacula (http://www.bacula.org). Amanda can also backup WinXX machines to tape using samba. These packages can be used as back ends to BackupPC to backup the BackupPC server data to tape. Steve |