[geeks] Cheap/reliable backup?

[Phil Stracchino]

On 12/03/13 09:49, microcode at zoho.com wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 08:35:49AM -0600, Michael Parson wrote:
>> tar can do multi-volume backups, originally designed for tape.  You can
>> specify the length of the tape (output file size) and specify a script
>> to be exectuted when that filesize is hit.  The script would rotate the
>> file to file-n.
> 
> Thanks, this sounds vaguely familiar. I think I did use it at some point but
> read it doesn't always work or has bugs with edge cases, can't remember..
> Maybe I'm wrong as I usually am with anything UNIX-related. I'll look at it again.

I had at one point a tar-based backup scheme that I built.  I found that
it was unreliable, as well as slow to restore from, because the tar
format makes it difficult to recover data beyond any error.  So I
switched to a modification based upon cpio, in which it is much easier
to resync after an error, and a read error would result in only the loss
of the file containing the error.  Then I modified *that* and switched
to afio instead of cpio, because afio worked just like cpio except
faster and with much lower CPU usage.  And then after that, I became an
early-adopter of Bacula, and have been using it ever since, in
combination with RAID and ZFS to try to reduce the likelihood of needing
to restore from a backup in the first place.


None of which sheds light on the media question, of course.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: 603.293.8485