Source for refurbished Tape Drives or Drive Repair

[abreauj at gmail.com (John Abreau)]

I'm setting up a backup server using rsnapshot to do rsync backups
over ssh. The plan is to backup all systems to the central backup
server each night, and then back the server up to tape.

As I understand it, Amanda sits on top of gnu tar. Can gnu tar do
the right thing with the hard links so it doesn't try to backup the
daily directories redundantly? On other words, ff the backups use
10 GB of disk space, and there are 10 daily/monthly directories, I don't
want Amanda trying to back up 100 GB of data.

I believe dump(8) and restore(8) do the right thing in this case.
Can amanda be configured to use dump and restore instead of
gnu tar?


On 3/19/07, Rich Braun <richb at pioneer.ci.net> wrote:
> Kristian Hermansen <kristian.hermansen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am interested in why you have decided to stick with tape.  I have
> > read research papers that claim tapes fail nearly 100% of the time
> > given some pretty common constraints (time, backup method, rotation,
> > etc).  IIRC, this biggest factor was the high probability of failed
> > restoration from a backup tape.  In the end, it should be cheaper to
> > backup to disk, right?
>
> There are two reasons that I believe tape still beats disk:
>
> 1) The cost per gigabyte is less on tape
> 2) You can more readily keep one or more offsite copies with tape
>
> What I do is keep a couple dozen tapes on a 3-month rotation in a 15-slot
> jukebox.  I'm sure the cost has fallen since my last tape purchase; back then
> I think I paid about $25 apiece for AIT-2 tapes (50Gb native capacity).  Disk
> drives have gotten cheaper but I still can't quite envision buying a couple
> dozen of them to hot-swap in and out as readily as I can with tape.
>
> Also, I use the software tool Amanda to manage my tape rotation.  It could be
> modified to use hard disks instead of tapes, but such support isn't
> off-the-shelf.  And to get the same config I've got now, I'd have to figure
> out some hardware way to be able to load 15 drives into a hot-swap cabinet:
> probably more expensive than the used AIT2 jukebox units that can be had on
> eBay.
>
> Maybe others here have done exactly this and I'll go with removable hard disks
> instead of tapes next time.
>
> Tape media errors happen about once every year or two on my system.  I simply
> pull the offending tape out of rotation.  Any single failure is not a concern
> because I have so many copies of each permanent file; I might lose data but
> only if a failure happened to a tape holding recently-created files.  I won't
> ever face the kind of loss I incurred during a 1997 burglary, when my most
> recent backup (to QIC cartridges and diskettes) was 2 or 3 years old due to
> the onerous tedium of all my previous backup methods.
>
> -rich
>
>
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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