[lug] Backup media and programs opinions?

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 12:02:48PM -0600, Ferdinand Schmid wrote:
>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

I find that fast file retrieval is great, but the last I used it dds2tar
doesn't support fast file access on anything but the first volume of the
archive.  I did use dds2tar for quite a while and had good results with it.

I have since switched to using 80GB hard drives for backup media.  With
120GB drives at around $140, it's hard to beat the cost of using a hard
drive for backups.  I currently reboot the backup machine to swap hard
drives, but I have a USB external drive enclosure coming this week which
I'm going to evaluate for use as a hot-plug for the backup drives.

>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

Why can't you skip bad blocks?  tar will re-sync if things go weird and
will start searching for the next file header.  You may run into trouble if
you are in the middle of a tar file when this occurs though, and would have
to do a manual override in that case.

Of course, if a tape is totally destroyed, you can simply being reading on
the next tape -- tar can also do that...

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
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