[KLUG Members] Backup hardware and software

[Bryan-TheBS-Smith]

Daniel Szalay wrote:
> Two questions...
> Anyone using HP or Seagate Travan tape drives for backups?

The longevity of Travan (aka QIC) is questionable.  The requirement
of regular retensioning is a dead giveaway.  I highly recommend 4mm
DAT/DDS or 8mm Exabyte/Sony, among a few, select others.  Well worth
the cost in media cost and longevity.  The "hidden cost" of
Travan/QIC is the damn cartridges.

> How about Arkeia verses BRU for software?

Didn't EST, the guys behind BRU, go under?

I like to use "dump" (or "xfsdump" for XFS filesystems) on drives
that have hardware compression.  For drives without hardware
compression, I like "afio" which is cpio-compatible and does
per-file compression, which doesn't mean a single error toasts your
archive (like you would with tar.gz or another archiver+compression
that does compression on the entire archive).

I also have a tcsh script, which should work on any UNIX (possibly
even Windows w/Cygwin), that will give you a good 1.5-2GB on a CD,
using per-file compression and mkisofs (or mkhybrid).  It has a
number of options (see the top of the script).  It just makes the
ISO image, which you can copy to any system that has a burner (even
Windows).  It is at:
   http://www.smithconcepts.com/files/scripts/back2cd.tcsh

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith     mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org     chat:thebs413
Engineer   Absolute Value Systems, Inc.   http://www.linux-wlan.org
President     SmithConcepts, Inc.      http://www.SmithConcepts.com