[K12OSN] Linux Tape Backup Software

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2004-02-28 at 18:48, James Jensen wrote:

> tar works very well for me for tape.  And, of course Mondo Rescue is
> rock solid and backs up to tape, DVD, CD, just about whatever you
> want.

Note that amanda actually uses your choice of gnutar or dump for
the actual work.  Amanda is a manager/scheduler for multi-machine
backups that takes care of everything else including computing
the best mix of full and incremental runs to fit on your tape.
You configure a 'dumpcycle' (in days), the runs per dumpcycle,
(which may be less if you only run on weekdays), and 'tapecycle'
(the number of total tapes).  The tapecycle should be some
multiple of the runs per dumpcycle.  Assuming that the total
tape space is reasonable, amanda takes care of getting at
least one full dump of every filesystem in each dumpcycle
and at least an incremental of every filesystem one every
run. It also indexes everything so you can tell it to restore
something from a filesystem as it was on a certain date and
it will prompt you with which tape(s) to put in.  You label
the tapes before use and amanda will not overwrite a tape
until it reaches it's place in the tapecycle, and will send
email if the wrong tape is left in the drive.  Once it is
set up all you have to do is swap tapes sometime during the
day.  If you forget, it will dump to a holding disk space
and send email to remind you to flush it to tape later.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com