On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 15:10 -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. Hopefully someone here can give me a recommendation.

This is what I need: - Simple launching of manual backups (preferably from the command line) - Ability to span tapes for a large backup - Proper treatment of hardlinked files - Notification via email or similar when it is ready for the next tape.

<snip>

Anyone have any suggestions? I would think that there would be a simple program out there to backup and restore from tape without all of the extra scheduling and indexing features.

It's been a long time since I looked at them but both tar (short for tape archive) and cpio have the features you want, IIRC. Cpio is fed by "find" usually so you can do things like -depth to affect order. I know cpio has ability for media change prompt at the invoking terminal, I don't recall if tar does or not.

You'll have to read up on tar to see how it does hard links (I can't remember) but cpio can do them right.

Caveat: it's been a long time since I used these for what you are looking at. Investigate thoroughly.

-- Bowie <snippity, snippity siggity,siggity>

HTH

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, 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. Hopefully someone here can give me a recommendation.

This is what I need:

• Simple launching of manual backups (preferably from the command line)
• Ability to span tapes for a large backup
• Proper treatment of hardlinked files
• Notification via email or similar when it is ready for the next tape.

I tried mondo-rescue, but decided against it after it spent 4 hours just trying to index the files (it never actually started the backup).

I am considering Amanda, but the setup is a bit complex and, based on the docs, the tape spanning capability isn't the best.

Anyone have any suggestions? I would think that there would be a simple program out there to backup and restore from tape without all of the extra scheduling and indexing features.

Bacula (www.bacula.org) will do what you want, though wading through the initial configuration process can take a couple hours. Tape spanning is well supported; backups can be scheduled or initiated from the command line; the cli restore process has an interface similar to dump/restore, so it's fairly easy to navigate.

We use it to back up CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, and OS X to tape.

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. Hopefully someone here can give me a recommendation.

This is what I need: - Simple launching of manual backups (preferably from the command line) - Ability to span tapes for a large backup - Proper treatment of hardlinked files - Notification via email or similar when it is ready for the next tape.

I tried mondo-rescue, but decided against it after it spent 4 hours just trying to index the files (it never actually started the backup).

I am considering Amanda, but the setup is a bit complex and, based on the docs, the tape spanning capability isn't the best.

Anyone have any suggestions? I would think that there would be a simple program out there to backup and restore from tape without all of the extra scheduling and indexing features.

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.

--Ajay