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