Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 13:09 -0400, Bowie Bailey wrote:
> > > > I am looking for a simple backup program that I can use to
> > > > backup a CentOS box to a local tape drive.
>
> > > http://flexbackup.sf.net
> > >
> > > I used that for years, but the network grew and needed a "bigger"
> > > solution so I switched to backuppc which is working great.
> >
> > I'm using backuppc. I just need something to dump the backuppc
> > machine to tape for an offsite or last-resort backup. The problem
> > is that backuppc is currently using 161GB (compressed) and the
> > tapes only hold 40GB each, so I need something with some sort of
> > intelligent tape-spanning capability.
>
> You are going to have more trouble than that. Backuppc will have
> millions of hardlinks in that 161GB and nearly all file oriented
> backup programs will take an impractical amount of time to deal
> with them. And restoring will be even worse - basically everything
> ends up building a table of inode numbers and scanning it for a match
> on every hardlink.
True, but this will only be used as a last-case scenario for restores,
so in that case I'm willing to wait a bit.
> > I haven't seen flexbackup. I'm currently evaluating afbackup.
>
> You really want a matching external hard drive so you can
> dd an image copy to it. There has been quite a bit of discussion
> on this topic on the backuppc mail list and I'm not sure anyone
> has come up with an ideal solution. Or, you can use the 'archive
> host' feature of backuppc to generate tar images of backup runs
> optionally compressed and split to fit your media, but these
> are copies of individual hosts and you loose the pooling feature.
I agree that hard drives are faster, larger, and cheaper than tapes,
but I can drop a tape onto a concrete floor and reasonably expect it
to work afterwards. A hard drive might still work, but I wouldn't
want to bet on it.
--
Bowie
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