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.
>
> When you can use a couple of less than $0.40/Gig IDE drives into a
> mirror any use something like Dirvish (or rsync with --link-dest),
> much of the reason for tapes goes away.
>
> There are still reasons for tapes, but they're quickly dwindling. Per
> gig, they are still cheaper. And a Semi full of tapes has an
> incredible bandwidth (but horrible latency) when shipped offsite.
>
> Tapes are notoriously slow. Tapes have a low finite read/write cycle
> limit. Tape drives must be cleaned often, and backups must be verified
> to ensure they were written properly. Like any magnetic medium, tapes
> have an arguably "short" shelf life. As with any backups, backups to
> tape should be tested periodically to ensure the backup software used
> is making good backups that can be recovered from (you won't learn
> this rule until you are bitten by it).
>
> I would much rather use a farm of Linux servers with cheap IDE disks
> for my backups spread between geographic locations (this is what we do
> at NKS). Rsync is fast, easy to comprehend, and incredibly easy to
> restore from. With rsync's --link-dest, hardlinks are made between
> backups to files that are identical, saving disk space. The manpower
> of backups and restores alone makes this fiscially the best thing to do.
>
> If you are _still_ interested in tape backups, you're probably in a
> datacenter backing up mainframes and other larger machines. In that
> case, invest in a backup software suite like NetBackup (or if you're
> using Windows boxes, possibly Backup Exec) and go buy yourself some
> large SAN network that you'll spend too much money on, just to make
> management happy. I hate Legato Networker with a passion. There are
> other commercial packages for Linux like Arc backup, Arkeia, or BRU:
> they generally all suck.
>
> If you're an individual and _have_ a tape drive and a mess of tapes,
> and want an opensource solution, then there's Amanda. I think I've
> seen one other opensourced tape backup solution out there on par with
> Amanda (though I've forgotten its name).
>
> Anyway, that's my $0.02. I don't expect everyone to agree with me ;)
>
> - Ian C. Blenke <ian@blenke.com> http://ian.blenke.com/
>
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>
Agree with everything Ian mentioned. Only advantage to of tape, is to
have multiple copies (different days/weeks/months/eoy) of same data set,
that can be stored off site (incase of disaster). I have used
Brightstor from Ca in a production enviroment. Software worked fine
(bit of a learning curve)... their tech support out of Tampa is horrible
(one time told me to install Window NT 4.0 patch 3.0 on Redhat server to
fix my problem. Yes, sadly was true).
http://www3.ca.com/solutions/Product.aspx?ID=3370
Off site storage could be managed with USB/Firewire HD storage of data
that can be taken off site.
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