[lug] Tape backup app

[Nate Duehr]

B Giles wrote:

> The main advantage to dump is that it understands things that the OS or 
> backup tool may not understand.  Dump/restore should handle extended 
> attributes and ACLs, while tar won't.

Any particular advantage to using something like cpio?  I never 
understood that tool very well, personally.

tar and dump seem to always work... which is important in backups.  I'm 
a boring guy, I guess.  Old dog, new tricks.  All that stuff.

But this discussion coming up again got me to wondering.

That and the commercial software we're using here (www.bakbone.com) 
defaults to using cpio on most Unix-derivative systems.

It seems to work very well so far, and only has some minor quirks about 
how it handles multiple tape drives in a changer that I don't like, but 
I could get around them with enough effort.  Example:  It has "tape 
groups" of different types of tapes to handle not writing, say... full 
backups to the same tapes as the incrementals -- if that's how you 
configure it.  If three backups kick off that need tapes from the same 
group, three blank tapes get loaded and it streams to all three at once. 
   And then keeps reusing those. Very efficient time-wise, but expensive 
on tapes if you have to take them out early... because you have three 
half-full tapes instead of a tape and half.)

-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com