[SGVLUG] Mondo backups on "mondo" tape drives

[Tom Emerson]

On Wednesday 19 October 2005 10:45, Dustin wrote:
> 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:

Here's one to add to your "articles" section:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/backups.html

which in turn points to:
http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/backup/

[cool name for a site, BTW] which is an FTP directory of various backup 
programs & scripts

The page is a bit dated -- in fact I see it was written in 2000 -- so the 
prices he mentions [and the relative lack of reliability of cd-rw] are no 
longer accurate.  It seems he is recommending DDS, but that's hard to find 
nowadays, has ALWAYS been overpriced (but you make up for it on media...) and 
the whole "savings" thing goes by the wayside the first time the drive "eats" 
a tape [and it will...]  He doesn't recommend DLT or LTO [too high-end for 
the home user, which is probably true] and doesn't even talk about DVD-R 
[wasn't available then, I'd imagine...]

OTOH, his page is #3 on google [right behind the "paid" ads and a 
compatability matrix from Tolis, who produces BRU...]

The next google link looks pretty good: "Linux tape backup for a home network"
http://baheyeldin.com/linux/using-tape-backup-on-linux-for-a-home-network.html


> 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

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