[geeks] Linux tape backup help

[der Mouse]

>> (You say "tar", but there are many variants of tar, with disparate
>> capabilities.)
> I am using the Ubuntu Linux (likely Debian related) variant in this
> case.  I don't know how much that'll mean to you if you use something
> different.

I don't use Linux myself, so I don't actually know that much about it.
But I would tend to assume their tar is some version of the GNU
variant.  My understanding is that it has relatively good support for
use as a backup tool, including support for incremental backups and
size estimates and the like, but I don't know details (such as what
command-line flags you want); for those I can't say much more than to
point you at the documentation.

> The server is essentially a Ubuntu LAMP environment with samba and
> dns facility added.  The mainstay of the backup will be [...]

If you have enough disk space, I'd echo a suggestion someone else made
of backing up to a disk file first, so you have the actual backup size
before you start writing to tape.  Another computer with a nice big
disk would probably make this easier; depending on how much budget you
have for such things, this might or might not be practical - though if
you're buying multi-hundred-gig tapes, I would guess you can probably
afford (today's idea of) a low-end machine which will be plenty good
enough for accepting backups over the net, stashing them locally, and
ultimately writing them to tape.

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