Re: Retro
Try Chapter 2 of the Retrospect Manual: Fundamentals. Best trick with Retrospect is not to make any assumptions about it - if you think that you're being smart and getting around a traditional backup/retore problem, don't bother 'cause retrospect has probably already taken that into account for you :) The only instances where you will need to track things a little differently is if (as others have mentioned) you have massive database files that change on a regular basis. Don't forget that by doing full backups, you are losing the versioning capability so if you save a file with mistakes and you're doing full backups you've lost the older versions. I used to have some literature that I'd written out for explaining incrementalPlus somewhere - have to go dig that out of the archives... Cheers, Erik Quoting David Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Eric - is there a really good, down-to-earth, layman's terms explanation of IncrementalPlus lying around somewhere? Sounds like it's time for a note on how it works, why it's so functional, and how it makes our lives easier. I'd do it myself but why reinvent the wheel? I'm sure you have a ready-made "tutorial" somewhere around there, no? :-) Reading between the lines I suspect that one or both of these folks are trying to apply the typical Win/DOS backup tape operation to Retrospect. Over the years I've discovered you have to talk about how low end PC backup programs which use the archive bit to know what's changed and erase all of that from their head before they begin to understand how Retrospect works. And until that happens their setup, usage, and results will be a mess. -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Search: http://www.mail-archive.com/retro-talk%40latchkey.com/ For urgent issues, please contact Dantz technical support directly at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or 925.253.3050. -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Search: http://www.mail-archive.com/retro-talk%40latchkey.com/ For urgent issues, please contact Dantz technical support directly at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or 925.253.3050.
Re: AIT drives
On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 03:24:17PM +0100, jakob krabbe wrote: AIT = Advanced Intelligent Tape. 1. I belive this have been discussed before, but please correct me if I'm wrong when I say Retrospect doesn't take advantage of the chiptechnology inside those tapes. Currently Retrospect does not talk to the chips on the tape. In most cases, the utility of the chip is minimal since most of the ideas that people were going to use it for are duplicated within Retrospect already (tape indices, etc.) The one thing I'm hoping that Retrospect will do is embed the name of the tape on the chip so that you don't have to physically load each tape all the way into the loader to determine the tapes that are inserted. Well - two things - the tape also tracks overall usage and error rates on write operations so it would be useful to have a flag that checks this data and alerts you when an arbitrary reliability threshold has been exceeded before you reuse a tape. 2. Would it be wise (possible??) to cycle those tapes in six or eight week periods? (We have cd backups for the archive.) Yup - that wouldn't be a problem. One of the key advantages of the AIT/VXA Advanced Metal Evaporative (AME) physical media is that it doesn't degrade with use as rapidly as does a DLT or DAT tape that uses a glue binder to attached the magnetic media to the physical tape itself. 3. It is possible to connect and use the drive to a computer that just have the regular SCSI or dose the drive demand Wide SCSI to work at all? You can hook it up to a regular SCSI - you just won't see the high end performance. On a beige G3 I've seen throughput up to 200Mb/min using the built-in SCSI port. There's an excellent white paper available from Spectralogic that covers all the technical details quite well at: http://www.spectralogic.com/resources/brochure/White_Paper_Tape_Drive_Technology.pdf Cheers, Erik Ableson -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: AIT drives
Yup - we use lots of AITs - not the LaCie ones specifically, but since it's just the SONY mechanism in a LaCIE case it should be representative. Currently we're using the 25/50 tapes but there's very little difference in the new ones. We have over 4,000 AIT tapes in current use over the course of the last year and there have been 8 tapes that had problems which were all mechanical drive issues. So that's a damage rate of .2% on very high usage backup servers. Note that that's stricly the tapes that were 'eaten' as it were. We've never seen an instance where data written to the media was unreadable. I haven't found a tape system that's completely bulletproof since you are dealing with moving physical tapes around a complex path, but the AIT's have been about as close as they get. You might want to look at the VXA tape stuff as well since the media is the same as far as I've been able to determine and I think the drive are marginally less expensive. Cheers, Erik Ableson On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 01:17:17PM -0800, Victor Orly wrote: Does anyone have any experience with the LaCie AIT 35 GB/70 GB drives? -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Moving To A New System and Backups
On Fri, Feb 18, 2000 at 11:04:12AM -0600, Chris Chapman wrote: The new system will not contain a backup drive, as it is a thin rackmount system (IBM Netfinity 4000R). What is the best way to perform network backups of a Linux based PrimeBase system? Is it possible for me to run Retrospect on a Mac, having iDal on the same machine, saving the backups locally rather than on the remote system? Then backing up with RetroSpect... Is this even possible?? One option based on your description is to load the afpd software onto the Linux box so that you can publish directories as an AppleShare File Server. Then simply have your (scheduled!) idal backup script run and move the backup to this directory which can be backed up by retrospect. I've done that on an OS X box, and I have a Linux box that is running afpd quite happily so that should work. You can script Retrospect to log into a server volume, storing the userid and password internally, so that it will log in, do the backup and log out without any required user intervention. The only question I can see that might be a problem is the 'endianness' of PrimeBase as the data files for Intel-based systems are different from those of PowerPC based systems, although I would guess as long as you put them back by reversing the process you should be fine. Give it a spin let us know! Cheers, Erik Ableson -- -- To subscribe:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives:http://list.working-dogs.com/lists/retro-talk/ Problems?: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
