[lug] Backup media and programs opinions?

[Ferdinand Schmid]

Ed's post reminded me of another aspect:  QFA - Quick File Access.  DAT and dds2tar offer 
this feature in its basic form for free - and it works well.  But if you don't need QFA 
because you don't have users who occasionally (or frequently) delete or destroy (hello M$ 
Word/Excel) important files then the time it takes to restore yesterday's or last week's 
copy of this file isn't important.

Think very carefully about what you need.  Almost any user on a *nix platform can read 
your tar on a dat media.  But you can't skip bad blocks on the tape in this case so you 
really need to abide by the golden rule of backup:  "You should be able to smile if at any 
time someone takes a hammer and smashes one of your tapes."  Of course even systems than 
can skip those dreaded bad blocks on media can't help you if your tape gets physically 
damaged.

Ferdinand

Ed Hill wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 11:19, Ferdinand Schmid wrote:
> 
>>Since I need to take backups off site I like tapes.  DAT tapes are certainly cheap and all 
>>present.  I haven't evaluated small backup solutions recently - but I did evaluate larger 
> 
> 
> 
> As Ferdinand said, DAT tapes are cheap and readily available.  And since
> you are only backing up few small-ish disks, you might be able to use
> GNU tar and the mtx (mtx.sourceforge.net) utility.  I'm currently using
> tar + mtx on both solaris and linux boxes and you can't beat the price.
> 
> Ed
> 
> ps - The command to automatically backup across a 6-tape DAT box is:
> 
>        tar -cMf /dev/st0 -F 'mtx -f /dev/sg0 next'  /path/to/backup
> 
>      and this can easily be added to a crontab entry.
> 
> 


-- 
Ferdinand Schmid
Architectural Energy Corporation
Celebrating 20 Years of Improving Building Energy Performance
http://www.archenergy.com