[lbackup-discussion] Backup to Tape?

henri reply to this message via the mailing list
Thu Dec 17 08:16:38 NZDT 2009


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> LBackup is disk-to-disk backup front end to rsync. 

LBackup or more specifically rsync has no functionality for interacting with tapes unless they are mounted as a file system, which would probably be very slow if you worked out a way to do this. 

It may be that in the future we will see tape units with advanced caches or software to allow the mounting of a tape as a file system. However, to the best of my knowledge this is not feasible at the moment. 

It possible to store your backup set within an image file (containing a virtual file system) and then use another program to write this image file to tape when it is unmounted. 

Yet another approach is to use Section.0 (most recent section) as a disk staging area prior moving the data to tape. 

Either way remember to setup a lock so that the backup or backup set being staged to tape will not start while it is being written to tape. 

There are a variety of tools, both commercial and open source available for copying data to tape.

One of the design goals of LBackup is to allow easy restore and direct access to backups using the file system(s). This makes it possible to use commands such as lcd to navigate your backup set forwards and backwards though time while you remain in the same directory. You may also perform searches for various data within your backup set using any of the tools you have access to when searching a file system because the backup is stored in a file system. Essentially, the file system is the database used for keeping tabs on your files.

At present there are no plans to add tape support to LBackup.




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