[BackupPC-users] Tape archives with BackupPC?

[Oliver F. <Oli...@io...>]

Hello,

I'm currently trying to switch the Backup-system of my company
to a disk-based system running on linux (along with switching the
windows servers to samba, but that's another story).

So I'm investigating BackupPC, so far with great results.
So far I backup a linux server with rsync, and (for testing)
a windows client via smbclient. We're gonna have a pool
of about 320GB, on 2 disks probably connected by LVM, so there's
room to add more disks if needed.

For now the company uses a tape-based backup called Veritas Backup Exec,
and the guy how uses it doesn't like it...

Now I have to find out how to archive the data on the Backup-PC onto 
tape, for long-term-archival (they wanna be able to get back everything 
somehow) and for disaster-recovery.

So I could just run amanda in the usual, client-server way, but it would 
duplicate the effort of BackupPC, pulling all the data over the net, and 
write it to tapes.

Or I would tar the whole BackupPC pool in one archive, but it might be 
too big for one tape, and useful only for desabster recovery (Write back
the whole thing, but not easily get out a single file, caused by the 
name mangling etc.)

Or BackupPC_tarCreate: Let it create a tar archive for each back-upped 
machine and dump that to tape. Later we can directly pipe that to the 
machine in need for restore.

Well, if anybody else is doing something like this, I really like to
share their point of view.

Thanks in advance,

     Oliver Freyd