Matt Stamm wrote:
I'm still pretty new to Linux. I have a Samba server up and running and need to install tape backup before I can setup our in-house users on the server. Any suggestions on where to get started. I browsed the Suse documentation and didn't find anything on tape backup. I also checked YAST and didn't anything on setting up a tape drive or installing tape backup software.
Any suggestions on tape drives and software would be appreciated.
Matt
I've been using a product called BRU for years. RedHat shipped a version of it with their distro back in the 5.x days. I've since purchased the product and use it for backups of all my machines. That being said, there is no reason you can't simply use tar or any other backup application to handle what you need to do. In fact, I'm sure there are probably better applications out there today. Something with a backup database perhaps. As much as BRU and tar do the job, it does take about an hour to restore a file here. The time is required because BRU has to search through the tape session looking for the file. Backing up your system in multiple "sessions" - ie one for /usr, another for /etc, another for /home, another for /var - could speed up this process if you remember which session is for which directory structure. Pretty simple if you use a script for backups which we all *should* do. Familiarize yourself with a utility called "mt" (magnetic tape). It's the utility used to rewind, forward, eject, retention, etc. tape media and it is a console utility. As for drives, I use a Seagate DDS4 tape drive connected to an Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller. This is somewhat high end though, although not as high end as a DLT, SDLT, etc. You could just as easily use an older DDS3 or even DDS2 drive. I'd avoid the IDE or floppy controller based drives. I've just had too many problems with these over the years. Of course you could go with other methods of backup such as RAID 1 mirroring, CD-RW media, or ftp'ing data to another machine. In some scenarios these work just fine. It just depends on your environment, budget, and requirements. -- John LeMay KC2KTH Senior Enterprise Consultant NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-557-4848 Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions