[Gllug] tar.gz

[Bruce Richardson]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 05:58:40PM +0000, Simon wrote:
> So far most of the suggestions have been for SCSI tape solutions or
> CDR. I've got a server here with an enormous disk[1] that I want to
> use for backing up the other servers nightly. A tape dump will be made
> from this about once a week, but we've got an awful lot of data, and I
> can't afford a tape changer.... 
> 
> Any suggestions?

You could misuse Amanda.  Amanda is usually set up with a holding disk:
data pulled from remote hosts is saved to the partition first so that it
can be streamed to the tape at a constant speed (more efficient, saves
wear on the tape etc).

If there's no tape in the drive then the data is kept on the holding
disk and you can flush it to tape later with the amflush utility.

Now, Amanda is supposed use 1 tape for 1 run but according to the
documentation if you have multiple backups retained on the holding disk
then they can all be flushed to the same tape, providing there is room.

The advantages of this is a) you can take advantage Amanda's intelligent
incremental backup system and b) you get the benefit of Amanda's restore
shell, amrecover,  which is a kind of virtual shell where you move
through a model of your filesystem using the standard navigation
commands (cd, ls and so on), moving not just between directories but
back and forth in time.

The advantage of your enormous disk is that it should have room for all
of the backup runs.  The holding disk on my home system isn't so big so
Amanda does a more-than-usually-agressively-incremental backup on those
occasions where I forget to put a new tape in.

Of course, this all depends on there being a tape big enough to hold
your data.  How much data do you have?  If there's no way to fit a
week's runs onto one tape then you could split the backup into multiple
different runs, Amanda can do multiple configurations.

-- 
Bruce

I unfortunately do not know how to turn cheese into gold.
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