On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 01:11 -0500, Kwan Lowe wrote:
> > I have to agree with Ian. I used to back up our office machines to tape.
> > This was using an IDE tape drive that accepted up to 3G Travan tapes.
> > Slow as hell to back up, and it was hit or miss whether the backups
> > would actually work or not. These suckers would spin one way for a
> > while, spin another for a while, and generally take an order of
> > magnitude or more longer to back up to than disk.
>
> I prefer to run two-stage backups on my customer machines... Tar several machines to
> a shared disk then steam the tars to tape. This decreases the backup window on the
> individual machines and generally speeds up the tape write.
>
> >
> > These days, I selectively back up certain mission-critical data to a
> > spare hard drive on another machine, and periodically make CD backups of
> > that. All driven by cron jobs, for which I get a message every day,
> > telling me how it all went.
>
> And that is exactly what I do for my personal systems.
>
> BACKUP_LIST="/etc /var/named/ /var/www/ /var/spool/mail /home/draken/mail "
> BACKUP_PATH="/export/backup/host001/"
>
> ssh root@host001 "cd /; tar -cf - ${BACKUP_LIST} "|(cd ${BACKUP_PATH}; tar -xf - )
>
> Then I use K3B to write the backup dirs to DVD.
>
Paul and Kwan,
This would be great if I wasn't talking about Gigabytes of data. In my
first post I wrote that I was thinking about using the AIT-2 drive
( SDX-520C ) as I can get 50GB native / 130GB compressed per tape. And
someone recently enlightened me to the fact that "AIT stores the tape
catalog on some form of memory chip (most likely flash) inside the
cartridge which in turn reduces the number of times it has to rewind and
advance the tape." My current backup is a nightly rsync of three 1.2TB
SCSI Raid 5 Array servers to a 4.3TB 24 disk Raid 5 backup server in
house. There's some good redundancy and fail-over there until the
building burns down. In my mind I was thinking that tapes have less
moving parts and less to go wrong than platter media. Also that the AIT
Drive was more advanced and had a larger storage capacity than other
tapes. The Data would be compressed and I guess I could fit it on a
portable drive or 2. I was just hoping to try to have a different media
type and one that was smaller and easier to transport off site.
Mike Branda Jr.
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