Re: [BackupPC-users] Long term backup solutions?

[Steve W. <swa...@ls...>]

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