[geeks] Linux tape backup help

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 08:46:45AM -0500, William Enestvedt wrote:
>If you staged the backup to local disk first (by writing to a tar file),
>you'd be able to know the size pretty accurately. Then you could write
>that to tape. Given how small your backups are, you might also hang on
>to those files for a days or two to save restoring from tape, and to
>give you ssome cushion should your tape or tape drive die.


If you are going to do that, then you might as well do it to another 
computer so the backups run much faster. Considering you can get a box with
a minimal motherboard, a dual core atom processor and a 1t drive for around 
$300, even here, it would, IMHO be a worthwhile investment. 

If you need really fast file level access to the backups, you can do it
in two stages, rsync the files to computer and then back them up. 

Note that modern tapes list their capacity with compressed data, as an 
"average" (usually twice the real capacity). This does not work for
things that are already compressed such as music and video files, 
compressed tar archives, rar and zip files, etc. I don't know of any that
get bigger, but it is theoreticaly possible.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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