[rescue] Backups

[Mike Hebel]

Someone generated the quantum flux that came across as... Jeffrey Nonken
>
> It could be I might find some of those 35 cent deals on the DLT drives
> you guys were talking about  :^) but I'd not seen any for the format I
> was familar with. I also feel twitchy about trusting really cheap tape
> drives. Why are they so cheap? How much wear is on those heads? Ditto
> cheap used media. One of the advantages of DVD is that I can get new
> drives and media cheaply. I'll have to swap media more often, but hey,
> this is a home backup. It's not that critical. Performance will be Good
> Enough.


Just a note on price - the DLT drives are cheap because they are corporate
take-outs usually.  Nine times out of ten they were taken out because of
capacity not wear.  I've met very few DLT drives that needed anything more
than a cleaning tape to ensure proper operation.  DLT3000/4000 drives are
cheap because one hard drive is now often beyond the capacity of a single
tape.

Oh and DTL4000 drives will most likely use DLT3000 tapes without issue
albeit with the lower capacity.  Really sturdy drives those DLTs. :-)

But if DVDs will work for your amount of data then fine.  I think you'll
have trouble implementing that on a 'nix system though.  Someone mentioned
 using cdrecord but I'm pretty sure that doesn't span.

As for backing up multiple clients with free software the two I hear most
often lately are Amanda and Backula.  Amanda does a great many things but
from personal experience it's hard to configure.  I haven't used Backula
personally but I know others that have.  Me?  I just use dump (0) or tar
on the main server and make sure my wife stores data there.  Easily
scriptable and with Samba/NFS you can back up most things on client
machines without too much trouble.  I'm not sure about bare-metal restore
for clients though which seems to be something that perhaps you're looking
for?

Mike
(0) People seem to hate it but I've always liked the ufsdump that comes
with Solaris.  It spans tapes just fine and seems fairly robust.----
"Without balance and consistent growth the only option is to degrade. 
There is no other solution." - Anonymous