On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 03:35:17PM -0400, Brent L. Bates wrote: ... > Tape backups suddenly started taking forever or never finishing because ...
An alternative to tape backup is disk-to-disk backup with rsync. I maintain a package called dirvish, a perl wrapper around rsync, which you can find at http://www.dirvish.org . Rsync uses hard links to minimize needless duplication of data, and moves only the changed portions of files the network. Thus, I can back up 100GB of data on 7 systems on my network (including two systems 3000km away) in about an hour every night. Because I am extra paranoid, the target backup drives are in USB2 hot swap cages, and get swapped to a fireproof safe every few days. I can generally get about 100 full (hard linked) images of the 100GB on a 300GB backup drive, and so I have backups, every day the last 3 years, on 12 hard drives in offsite fireproof storage. Dirvish is used to back up thousands of systems, ranging from small same-machine backups to large clusters like the Oregon State University Open Source Labs, hosting kernel.org, mozilla.org, and other major open source projects. Dirvish is very well tested and stable. There are other rsync-based backup disk-to-disk systems that are also worth a look. Consider packing away those tapes and tape drives, and moving to denser, cheaper, faster media like commodity hard drives. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
