[CentOS] Tape drive recommendations

[Les Mikesell]

Mark Schoonover wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Mark Schoonover wrote:
>>> John R Pierce wrote:
>>>> Aron.Darling at Emulex.Com wrote:
>>>>> Loader are totally a love/hate relationship.  They do make life a
>>>>> lot easier as they do the tape movements for you which can be a
>>>>> tedious thing at times.  With a loader or library you can script
>>>>> the entire operation with tar, MTX and MT and let cron do all the
>>>>> work for you. Always look for the OEM rather than buying the name
>>>>> brand equipment, they are most always the same HW and FW with a
>>>>> different model number in it.
>>>> otoh, its hard to beat a 3 year warranty and on location support
>>>> from the same vendor as your server hardware, assuming your a brand
>>>> name shop in the first place....  hugely reduces finger pointing
>>>> when there's a complex issue to resolve.   with OEM hardware bought
>>>> on the whitebox market, you're often faced with replace or
>>>> self-repair option at cost. 
>>>>
>>> Having used a 20 tape library, and suffering through restores with
>>> AIT2 tapes taking 10-12 hours per tape, I gave up on them. I went
>>> with good old rsync, and built up a 4 TB system to handle backups.
>>> Once configured, it's nearly a 100% hands off solution. You can read
>>> about what I've done here: http://marks-tech-pages.blogspot.com
>>> Works great especially for TBs of data that needs to be backed up
>>> every day. 
>> If you want something that stores the backups much more efficiently
>> (with a price in processing to do it), look at backuppc:
>> http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
>>
>> It compresses everything and hardlinks all duplicates so you can keep
>> about 10x what you'd expect online, and it has a nice web interface
>> for browsing the backups and doing restores.
> 
> Thanks Lee. I did look at backuppc before, and I didn't want anything that
> compresses files, or used a web interface. Using rsync, it's a matter of scp
> to restore, and that's it. I do use hardlinks to duplicate data, so my
> storage requirements are kept as small as possible. Just about any CentOS
> system can be configured to run backups in the manner I've written up,
> nothing extra to install or learn. So, like most things, it boils down to
> individual needs and expertise. I know for myself, tape backups just weren't
> working well at all.
> 

Backuppc can be configured to not compress, although I think the 
filenames are still somewhat mangled and don't have their real 
attributes so you can't access them directly.  The web interface is also 
optional and there are command line tools for everything you need.  It 
is handy to be able to download a single file or tar/zip archive 
directly through a browser, though - and in the latest version you can 
edit the configuration through the web interface.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com