Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula and LTFS
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. -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula and LTFS
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. 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. -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula and LTFS
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. -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
[Bacula-users] Bacula and LTFS
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? Please advise. Thanks Adam -- Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot ___ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
