Hey, Alan,
Alan McKay wrote: <snip>
gtar on the back end, which is how I ended up at Amanda. In looking through some of the initial configuration how-tos it seemed as though this was massively over-complex for my application. But then I hit upon "vaulting"
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_To:Copy_Data_from_Volume_to_Volume
<snip>
Basically I work in a scientific research lab (stem cell research) where the scientists produce a fair bit of raw data. We want to periodically take the data and archive it to tape and then remove it from disk and store the tape in our archival facility. We'd need a record of what is
<snip> For one thing, I think you seriously need to look at backup up to offline hard drives, instead of tapes. Unless you really want/need to archive the tapes for seven years, or whatever, legally, tapes are not the preferred solution these days: they're very slow to use for recovery, and h/d's are large and fast, and still cheap.
We back up to backup servers, then, every couple of weeks, I run rsync backups (well, we have a locally-rolled system to run the rsync) onto offline drives - in our case, I swap large drives into an eSATA drive bay. When I'm done, they go in the fire safe.
I will note that I work for a US federal agency who I shouldn't mention (I do not speak for the agency or my employer), and our division generates a lot of data, also: easily half a terabyte for one user, and a number for the group that does protein folding....
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