[CentOS] Re: Bacula -- near-line disk, off-line tape, diffs, windows, etc...

Wed Aug 3 01:56:21 UTC 2005
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 17:02, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

> Now I don't expect Freedomware solutions to offer the same
> level of "transparent tape virtualization," but I would be
> interested in any Open Source framework that uses a
> combination of near-line disk and off-line tape approaches.
> 
> E.g.,
> 1) nodes only rsync diffs over network to the "host" backup
> server

Backuppc is probably the only thing that can do this even
though the backup-server side only stores compressed files.
It has a custom implementation of rsync to manage this
while talking to standard versions on the target machines.
It can also use tar or smbtar for the transport.

> 2) the "host" backup server manages those diffs/volumes as
> near-line

It provides web access to browse/restore/download files.

> 3) the "host" backup server committs to tape for off-line as
> the discretion of the sys/netadmin

Backuppc allows you to write an 'archive' of a host
manually, either to tape or as a compressed tar split
in files sized to fit CDs or DVDs.  This is sort of an
afterthought though.   I just periodically mirror the
disk to an external drive to keep copies of the whole
thing offsite.   Since it keeps about 8x the data on
disk with it's compression and linking scheme it is really
easier to deal with it on disks.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com