[geeks] Linux tape backup help

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Thursday 14 January 2010, der Mouse wrote:
> > 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.  

I'll second this, but I'm not sure that adding another machine into the 
mix will be advisable.  You really want to try to keep the drive writing 
at full speed, which requires 60MB/sec for a 1/2ht drive or 80MB/sec for 
a full-height drive, which means that you'll need to read the backup off 
of some sort of RAID.

Also, the "wear" on the tape from not writing a full tape is not what 
you may think it is.  For LTO-3, the drive makes 44 passes end-to-end to 
write one tape.  So, the tape will move completely across the tape head 
once for every ~9GB (uncompressed) of data that you write to the tape.

There's a lot of useful information on the wikipedia page on LTO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

Pat
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