On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 05:07:07PM -0500, Ian C. Blenke wrote:
> Mike Branda wrote:
>
> >Hello all!
> >
> >Anybody have any experience backing up to tape with Linux?? Any drive
> >suggestions? I've been looking at a Sony AIT-2 drive ( SDX-520C ) as I
> >can get 50GB native / 130GB compressed per tape and I have a lot of data
> >to back up (hundreds of gigabytes). Sony says the drive is Linux
> >compatible and 2 companies offer Linux software for it...though they
> >charge an arm and a leg. I was wondering how well the amanda suite
> >works and any other suggestions as I have never worked with tapes. I
> >assume that archives larger than one tape's capacity can span? Any
> >advice and/or actual experience with tapes and/or this drive/media type
> >would be appreciated.
> >
> >
>
> It's arguably cheaper and easier anymore to use disk based backups.
>
<snip of sage wisdom by Ian>
I have to agree with Ian. I used to back up our office machines to tape.
This was using an IDE tape drive that accepted up to 3G Travan tapes.
Slow as hell to back up, and it was hit or miss whether the backups
would actually work or not. These suckers would spin one way for a
while, spin another for a while, and generally take an order of
magnitude or more longer to back up to than disk.
These days, I selectively back up certain mission-critical data to a
spare hard drive on another machine, and periodically make CD backups of
that. All driven by cron jobs, for which I get a message every day,
telling me how it all went.
However, if you insist, I used to use something called Taper. It was a
console/curses based app which could back up in a variety of ways (like
cpio and gzip). You need to ftape kernel module and some ini-file
tweaking to make it work. But it works. After a fashion. (Obviously, it
would also restore from tapes.)
Paul
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