From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Sep 15  3:11:40 1999
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Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 11:10:38 +0100
From: Adam Nealis <adamn@csl.com>
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To: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de>
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Tape backups
References: <4.1.19990914142612.0094da30@unix01.voicenet.com> <7rmkqe$7o5$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de>
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Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> 
> John <papalia@UDel.Edu> wrote:
> 
> > My boss hit me with this question, and I'm not sure of the answer.  We are
> > looking at buying 5 new servers, all of which will be configured (my
> > byself.... *gulp*) to run FBSD.  In an effort to save $$$, he wants to omit
> > tape drives from each server, and instead get one server with a
> > tape-changer in it.
> 
> Very reasonable. Make sure the tape changer works with FreeBSD. I
> have no experience in this area, but I'd be wary of solutions
> requiring proprietary drivers etc.
> 
> > I'm assuming that this will be possible to do using dumps over
> > NFS, however I was hoping for some confirmation from someone with
> > more experience in this?
> 
> You can't do dumps over NFS. Instead, you run the dump locally and sent
> its output over the net. In fact, dump itself supports writing to
> user@host:device. Otherwise you can dump to standard output, pipe into
> rsh, and continue from there. The same for restore, just in reverse.
> 
> Also, if you backup a small group of hosts on a central server, you
> might want to look into Amanda (ports/misc/amanda24), which very nicely
> helps to automate this kind of thing--including support for tape
> changers.
Seconded. Amanda is pretty good for this sort of thing. I used to use
amanda with a HP 12000E i.e. 6xDDS2 DAT autochanger, but it was too
unreliable. Instead I've invested in a HP DLT 70 - this holds up to 70GB
per tape, more if you were to use amanda's facility of gzipping
dumpsets.

I get a write to tape throughput of approx 2700KB/s.

Adam.


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