Which backup software to use?

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Okay... I finally spent the money to buy a tape drive for my
personal linux box at home. While I have the disk space to back up to
hard drive, it isn't a feasible option to rip the backup disks out of
a machine to store So in comes a tape drive.

The problem I am having now, is which software to use for it.
I'm currently limited to what is already available on the OS, or is
freely downloadable from the net (read: GNU). So that limits me
to tar, dump, dd, afio, pax, cpio. The big concern out of all of this,
is that there are different filesystem formats on the machine; namely
reiserfs and ext3. Reiserfs can not be backed up with dump, and
recently, Linus mentioned that dump, tar, and cpio are on his crap
list. The others don't have strong peformance records either. So the
question is, since I have 2 formats, which software would be best for
backing up? Also, I'm limited to one tape at the moment, but a full
backup can be stored onto that one tape.

Any insights into what best could be used, I'd greatly
appreaciate.

BL.

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Brad Littlejohn | Email: tyketto@sbcglobal.net
Unix Systems Administrator, | tyketto@ozemail.com.au
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Get Storix (http://www.storix.com). The free version will only backup to
disk, but their new desktop version is only $79 and does both tape and
disk backups. For that prices, its just not worth the time to try to use
tar and dd commands when they won't do anything as far as full system
recovery.

If backing up to tape, Storix will create a CDROM boot image for you. If
you backup to the hard disk, you can actually make the same hard disk
bootable so you can do a full system restore with no other boot media
needed.

We've actually tried just about every system recovery tool (as well as
commercial products) for Linux and Storix was the ONLY one that
recovered the system perfectly with absolutely no troubles. I need to
restore (and migrate) systems with LVM and software RAID devices, as
well as my SAN-attached disks, and nobody else even came close. And yes,
it supports all filesystem formats.

A Guy Called Tyketto wrote:

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> Okay... I finally spent the money to buy a tape drive for my
> personal linux box at home. While I have the disk space to back up to
> hard drive, it isn't a feasible option to rip the backup disks out of
> a machine to store So in comes a tape drive.
>
> The problem I am having now, is which software to use for it.
> I'm currently limited to what is already available on the OS, or is
> freely downloadable from the net (read: GNU). So that limits me
> to tar, dump, dd, afio, pax, cpio. The big concern out of all of this,
> is that there are different filesystem formats on the machine; namely
> reiserfs and ext3. Reiserfs can not be backed up with dump, and
> recently, Linus mentioned that dump, tar, and cpio are on his crap
> list. The others don't have strong peformance records either. So the
> question is, since I have 2 formats, which software would be best for
> backing up? Also, I'm limited to one tape at the moment, but a full
> backup can be stored onto that one tape.

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:16:29 GMT, A Guy Called Tyketto
<tyketto@sbcglobal.net.invalid> wrote:

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> Okay... I finally spent the money to buy a tape drive for my
>personal linux box at home. While I have the disk space to back up to
>hard drive, it isn't a feasible option to rip the backup disks out of
>a machine to store So in comes a tape drive.
>
> The problem I am having now, is which software to use for it.
>I'm currently limited to what is already available on the OS, or is
>freely downloadable from the net (read: GNU). So that limits me
>to tar, dump, dd, afio, pax, cpio. The big concern out of all of this,
>is that there are different filesystem formats on the machine; namely
>reiserfs and ext3. Reiserfs can not be backed up with dump, and
>recently, Linus mentioned that dump, tar, and cpio are on his crap
>list. The others don't have strong peformance records either. So the
>question is, since I have 2 formats, which software would be best for
>backing up? Also, I'm limited to one tape at the moment, but a full
>backup can be stored onto that one tape.
>
> Any insights into what best could be used, I'd greatly
>appreaciate.
>
> BL.
Amanda (http://www.amanda.org/) seems to be widely used,
although it wants to use separate tapes.
I wrote my own shell script to do full, incremental and
differential backups using afio. The restore part was manual but it
did work (both for tests and for restores from unintential deletes). I
was using a combination of ext3 and reiserfs.
There are other methods out there - using shell scripts or
Perl scripts. I don't have a list because none really did what I
wanted. I think they all came from sourceforge, though.
-------
Remove underscores from e-mail address.

Russ wrote:
> Get Storix (http://www.storix.com). The free version will only backup to
> disk, but their new desktop version is only $79 and does both tape and
> disk backups. For that prices, its just not worth the time to try to use
> tar and dd commands when they won't do anything as far as full system
> recovery.
>
> If backing up to tape, Storix will create a CDROM boot image for you. If
> you backup to the hard disk, you can actually make the same hard disk
> bootable so you can do a full system restore with no other boot media
> needed.
>
> We've actually tried just about every system recovery tool (as well as
> commercial products) for Linux and Storix was the ONLY one that
> recovered the system perfectly with absolutely no troubles. I need to
> restore (and migrate) systems with LVM and software RAID devices, as
> well as my SAN-attached disks, and nobody else even came close. And yes,
> it supports all filesystem formats.
>
> A Guy Called Tyketto wrote:
>
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>> Okay... I finally spent the money to buy a tape drive for my
>> personal linux box at home. While I have the disk space to back up to
>> hard drive, it isn't a feasible option to rip the backup disks out of
>> a machine to store So in comes a tape drive.
>>
>> The problem I am having now, is which software to use for it.
>> I'm currently limited to what is already available on the OS, or is
>> freely downloadable from the net (read: GNU). So that limits me
>> to tar, dump, dd, afio, pax, cpio. The big concern out of all of this,
>> is that there are different filesystem formats on the machine; namely
>> reiserfs and ext3. Reiserfs can not be backed up with dump, and
>> recently, Linus mentioned that dump, tar, and cpio are on his crap
>> list. The others don't have strong peformance records either. So the
>> question is, since I have 2 formats, which software would be best for
>> backing up? Also, I'm limited to one tape at the moment, but a full
>> backup can be stored onto that one tape.
>
>
Funny,

Tar, Crap List?

Time was when Linus was still hacking floppy sized kernels in graduate
school, where all you could get from the Free Software Foundation was
tar archived tapes of GNU software. Tar has always worked well for me
no matter what the medium. Oh well, new is better, different is
better, old is bad. If it ain't broke, don't fix it... JMTC

Michael

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:16:29 GMT, A Guy Called Tyketto
<tyketto@sbcglobal.net.invalid> wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>
>
> Okay... I finally spent the money to buy a tape drive for my
>personal linux box at home. While I have the disk space to back up to
>hard drive, it isn't a feasible option to rip the backup disks out of
>a machine to store So in comes a tape drive.
>
> The problem I am having now, is which software to use for it.
>I'm currently limited to what is already available on the OS, or is
>freely downloadable from the net (read: GNU). So that limits me
>to tar, dump, dd, afio, pax, cpio. The big concern out of all of this,
>is that there are different filesystem formats on the machine; namely
>reiserfs and ext3. Reiserfs can not be backed up with dump, and
>recently, Linus mentioned that dump, tar, and cpio are on his crap
>list. The others don't have strong peformance records either. So the
>question is, since I have 2 formats, which software would be best for
>backing up? Also, I'm limited to one tape at the moment, but a full
>backup can be stored onto that one tape.
>
> Any insights into what best could be used, I'd greatly
>appreaciate.
>
> BL.

I'd spend the $50.00 for BRU personal. You should look into it -
nicely flexible, robust enough to recover the data if you find a bad
spot on the tape, has a GUI interface if you lean that way but you can
also use the cli to batch jobs. That second point is critical if this
is really for backup of a hot system... The logical next step from
using tar, which (I think) is the best of the lot included in standard
distros.

Whatever you opt to use, I'd recommend doing some tests on what
happens when you need to restore and discover a bad spot on the tape -
it happens often enough that you really should be up on how to handle
it. Most simple backup apps, you've simply lost everything on the
tape past the bad spot. That's why I like BRU.

Mike-

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Michael W. Cocke wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 20:16:29 GMT, A Guy Called Tyketto
> <tyketto@sbcglobal.net.invalid> wrote:

> Whatever you opt to use, I'd recommend doing some tests on what
> happens when you need to restore and discover a bad spot on the tape -
> it happens often enough that you really should be up on how to handle
> it. Most simple backup apps, you've simply lost everything on the
> tape past the bad spot. That's why I like BRU.
>

Yeah, Storix does a great job with bad spots on tape also. It even lets
you configure the number of retries and whether to truncate date or pad
with nulls. This is very important to us because we backup raw databases
with it and need to preserve the data displacements even if there is
missing data on the restore.