Robin Mordasiewicz wrote: > On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, 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. >> >>> 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. >> > my .02$ is bacula > It spans tapes. fully featured, reliable, well documented etc. I used to use Bacula way back when, but restoring large amounts of data - 1TB range from tape is very slow. Went rsync to drives on another internal server, and a backup server in our colo. Rsync makes it very easy to do hourly, daily, weekly or monthly snapshots of data. HTH Mark