[lug] Backups...

[Chip Atkinson]

You might also wish to consider using several DAT tapes.  My reasoning is
that they are way cheaper than travan tapes.  While the drive is probably
more expensive, you will make up for the difference pretty quickly as
tapes go bad.  The dat tapes are significantly cheaper and IMHO easier to
cope with.  The coping problem comes when you accidentally degauss the
travan tapes.  They are preformatted and I believe that once that
formatting is gone, your tape is too.  

For $349 at corpsys.com, you can get a DAT tape drive that has a 4 tape
magazine.  You may also be able to find 12 tape magazines too.  

Another thing about DAT drives is that they are designed for audio use, so
they are really quiet.  The travan tape drive that I had was quite noisy
like the old QIC tape drives.  This was a real drag because I want to do
2 am backups and the tape drive was right across the bedroom door.  

With the DAT drive, you can programmatically control and report the status
of which tape is in the drive (as opposed to the magazine) with mtx.  mtx
works pretty well.

For backup software I use bru.  It has been quite reliable and double
checks the results of the backup after it's done.  I actually saw copies
of personal bru in CompUSA a few days ago.  Personal bru is just like bru
except the functionality has been reduced a bit, notably NFS backups.
The manual is pretty decent too.  

Chip

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 Chip Atkinson 
 http://www.pupman.com 
 --- If I can't fix it, I can fix it so it can't be fixed --
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On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, Stephen G. Smith wrote:

> Hello Everyone...  I am looking for a easy and cheap backup solution
> that will run on 1 24GB (compressed) tape...  I need 3 filesystems /boot
> /root and /apps at say 2am backed up and then verified with a
> confirmation either sent to a printer or mailed to a user... 
> 
> Im sooo lost....any ideas?
> 
> This is gonna be for a RH 6 machine and a SCO Openserver 5.0.5
> 
> 
>