[SGVLUG] Mondo backups on "mondo" tape drives

[Dustin]

On Wed, 19 Oct 2005, Emerson, Tom wrote:

> > Behalf Of Dustin

> > 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 made the list a while ago, and a lot of those tools were essentially
private scripts that had been released into the wild, so I'm not
surprised.  Perhaps I could have tried to clean it up before I posted it, 
though.

That was really a straight cut&paste of my file of administration links,
and I have several orders of magnitude too many links to maintain them.
So I don't notice dead links until I go to use them. :-(

> ...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 :( ]

Yeah, I noticed that.  Documentation isn't their strong point.

> (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)

Yeah, and you know how much time I have for stuff like that. :-)

But we could have a "Cool Tools" section that has other people's short 
talks, not just mine.

> 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...]

Yeah, though I don't really understand the difference either.  Plus there 
are other tools, including star, dump....

I have a link to a decent but dated comparison of some tools that shows 
that in a sense *all* of them can be induced to fail on screwy filesystems 
(files with holes were a big problem, IIRC), but in different ways and on 
different screwy situations.

The major thing I know about afio is that it compresses individual files, 
whereas tar compresses the archive all at once.  Tar therefore gets better 
compression ratios, but if the archive gets corrupted it usually destroys 
the entire archive whereas it may only hit one file with afio.

> 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.

Yes.  The major irritant for me is that even with DVDs a full backup 
requires swapping discs, so I can't do it overnight.

> 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]

Then maybe Amanda or Bacula is the right solution for you after all.  
There are other network-oriented systems, though, and I think my notes had 
a section for them.

Dustin