On 9/21/2017 11:22 AM, Adam Weremczuk wrote:
That's useful and makes perfect sense, thank you.
I'm new to both Bacula and LTO.
Just inherited Bacula 5.2 with LTO-4 and considering an upgrade.
LTO-4 doesn't support LTFS.
So I haven't found a way of examining / browsing what actually Bacula
writes to the tapes.
I can only see things like labels and byte counts from bconsole.
The LTO drive doesn't appear in mtab and I haven't found a way of
interacting with the tape drive and tapes outside Bacula.
Tapes do not have a file system, so are not mounted like a disk
partition (other than through LTFS). Data is read / written directly to
the SCSI device, likely /dev/nst0. The mt utility can be used to
interact with tapes. It is possible to dd data between the tape and a
file. Neither will understand the tape formatting, possible
decompression, or possible encryption. The tape and label formats are
documented in the Bacula documentation, but basically you must have
Bacula to properly read the tapes and extract any useful data from them.
On 21/09/2017 16:02, Josh Fisher wrote:
On 9/21/2017 6:23 AM, Adam Weremczuk wrote:
Hello,
A hypothetical scenario.
I have Bacula 9 running on Debian 9 and writing to LTO-7 tapes
(Quantum-Ultrium).
Can I read these tapes elsewhere without Bacula?
Normally that would require tapes to be formatted to LTFS.
Can Bacula write to LTFS tapes or can it only use own native data
structure?
Would browsing and copying data require Bacula tools (such as bls
and bextract) installed?
Does it matter if I write in Linux and read in Windows or Mac?
Can LTFS and Bacula work closely together or are they mutually
exclusive?
Bacula does not format the tapes as LTFS. However, Bacula can write
to disk volumes. It should certainly be possible to format and mount
the tape outside of Bacula using, say LTFS-SDE, and then configure
Bacula to write "disk" volumes to that mountpoint.
The answer depends on what you mean by "read". You could write Bacula
disk volume files to a LTFS mountpoint. The tape could later be
mounted on another system and those volume files could be read as any
other file. But to extract the internal contents of the Bacula volume
files, you would need Bacula or a tool of some sort that can
interpret the Bacula volume file. This is true of any file format.
You could also write PDF files to a LTFS tape and later restore them
somewhere else, but you couldn't view the PDF content without a PDF
viewer.
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