Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 19 Apr 2005 20:18:19 +0200
From:      Olivier Gautherot <oliviergautherot@free.fr>
To:        freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Cc:        Micheal Patterson <micheal@tsgincorporated.com>
Subject:   Re: Exabyte 221L Auto Loader
Message-ID:  <200504192018.20274.oliviergautherot@free.fr>
In-Reply-To: <018201c54506$c8c4ace0$4df24243@tsgincorporated.com>
References:  <018201c54506$c8c4ace0$4df24243@tsgincorporated.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi Michael!

> Is there anyone using this device with FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x? I'm new to the
> world of auto-loaders and am curious if FreeBSD's tar / dump utilities can
> support it properly for backing up of 3tb of data from various partitions.
> If so, are there any specifics that I should be aware of when using this
> device? Any recommendations on using other software other than tar or dump
> to do this that are available in the ports tree?

rsync and rsnapshot are alternatives - I particularly like the second one as 
it provides a kind of incremental backup (you can have several snapshots of 
the same file, what can be handy to retrieve an old version of a file after a 
deadly edit without having the sysadmin fiddle with tapes...)

Regarding tar, make sure you don't save a huge file on an ext2fs file system. 
I did this mistake once on a machine that was shared between FreeBSD and 
Linux and I've lost a significant amount of data: ext2fs does not support 
files of more than 4GB (compressing the archive does not shift the threshold 
- data will be lost before this). UFS2 is the way to go: the inodes 
management is not quite as efficient from a disk usage point of view but for 
huge disks, it will bring you peace of mind, which is priceless.

Hope it helps
-- 
Olivier Gautherot
olivier@gautherot.net



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200504192018.20274.oliviergautherot>