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.
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.