[SGVLUG] Mondo backups on "mondo" tape drives

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Dustin
> > Emerson, Tom wrote:
> 
> > > Any suggestions for programs that "really do understand" 
> > > [...] tape drive[s]
> 
> Well, at the bottom of my Mondo Rescue notes, I put a great number of
> links to backup programs/systems/scripts:
> 
> http://www.laurences.net/Dustin/Computer/UnixQuickies/mondorescue.html
> 
> Given how much time I wasted assembling it and not finding 
> another list as complete, it may actually be the most complete
> list on the web.

Yes, I did look at that [after I posted the above, naturally ;) ] and I've found it already has "broken links" :(  I even looked at the Mondo page itself, but their own documentation page is broken as well [the TOC comes up OK, but each link to the actual chapter/topic is broken -- double :( ]

(of course, we "should" link this to the SGVLUG site as a reference/tutorial or whatever.  If you prefer not to be "crawled", you could write it up "as an article" and we'll simply "publish" it via mambo/joomla)

> There are a lot of scripts which essentially just provide a fancy
> interface to standard unix archivers like tar and cpio [...]

While "tar" is well known, I've only *heard* of cpio/afio, but don't really "grok" what they are or how they work.  This might make a good 5-10 minute "intro" piece for an upcoming meeting [hint-hint for anyone reading this who has always wanted to give a presentation, but didn't know what to talk about...]

> [...] (I have no tape drive, so I never tried
> it--kinda wish I had one just for fun) [...]

I've got a couple of floppy-tape drives that are not currently "installed" [QIC-40/80 variety, I think, though the capacity might actually be upwards of 250MB]  May be slow as molassass as they say, but as you pointed out, this can be done when you're asleep.  Cartridges should be pretty cheap [though potentially hard-to-find] and can withstand a bit more "abuse" than CD-R's [per your recent link on media lifetimes -- seems scrathing the LABEL side can easily ruin a disk, which is certainly counter-intuitive]  Of course, it may be a case of "can withstand a different KIND of abuse" as once a tape gets "tangled" in the mech, you pretty much have lost it...

> 
> However, if Tom doesn't plan to use the network features, or 
> if he's going 
> to mirror the other machines with rsync and then just back up 
> the machine 
> hosting the mirror, does he need packages like that?  Dunno.

Well, actually, I do need to backup a "network" of machines, and the machine with the drive doesn't have enough space to host a copy of "whatever" before being dumped to tape [the tape drive is 40gb, but the disk(s) on the system only total 30gb, which is further reduced when you take into account the "installation" of linux itself and directories such as /var, /opt, and /tmp]
 
> > > Equally ironic, SuSE's own Yast program has a "system 
> backup" module
> 
> Heh.  Your first mistake was probably using some tarted-up pretty 
> graphical thing. :-)

Actually, I installed SuSE without X on this system, so it was using a tarted-up CURSES interface ;)

I probably should take a closer look at this -- at the very least, I *could* create the files in perhaps a /backup partition, then /manually/ use tar to copy the resulting .tar file to the physical tape drive  (actually, the backup system creates at least two files -- the .tar file as previously mentioned [or I suspect multiple .tar files if "broken into media-sized chunks"], and a .xml file describing the .tar file(s))