On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> For one thing, I think you seriously need to look at backup up to offline >> hard drives, instead of tapes. Unless you really want/need to archive the >> tapes for seven years > > > Well, the scientists are talking longer than 7 years so HDs just are not > going to cut it I'd be hard pressed to find a tape drive that could read any tape I've written that long ago. >> We back up to backup servers, then, every couple of weeks, I run rsync >> backups (well, we have a locally-rolled system to run the rsync) onto >> offline drives - in our case, I swap large drives into an eSATA drive bay. >> When I'm done, they go in the fire safe. >> > > That's what I'd prefer to do :-) You probably need to look at how you identify things first to see if any existing archive approach maps onto that well enough or has a searchable online index so you would know which tape to restore when someone asks for old data. Personally I always think of backuppc first for backups because it can hold so much more online, but it isn't great at archiving. You can make a standard tar image out of anything it has stored, but for anything but the latest run it would take some command line options or selecting it through a web browser. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com