Source for refurbished Tape Drives or Drive Repair

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Rich,

Are you willing to share your cron scripts and Amanda configurations
for this?

-derek

"Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> writes:

>> I'm setting up a backup server using rsnapshot to do rsync backups
>> over ssh. The plan is to backup all systems to the central backup
>> server each night, and then back the server up to tape.
>
> This comment made me realize that I had omitted an important detail of my
> setup:  in order to get a full 3 month rotation out of two dozen tapes, I had
> to set up Amanda to put daily incrementals onto the central backup server's
> hard drive.  These are then dumped to tape once a week, along with level-0
> (full) backups of key filesystems.  Only once a month do I perform level-0's
> of everything.
>
> To do that I came up with the following two hacks:  in a weekly cron script, I
> disable write access to the tape device every day except for one day of the
> week.  In a monthly script, I swap between two Amanda config files, with a
> different "runtapes" parameter and longer "dumpcycle" parameters for the
> less-frequently updated filesystems in my disklist.  Net result is I use one
> tape per week, except the first week of the month when 4 tapes are required.
>
> The alternative way to do this, as per the Amanda documentation, is to set up
> a separate configuration to run "archive" dumps once in a while to a separate
> set of tapes.  But my hacks include such archives (I'm talking big
> less-changing items like a hundred gigs of pictures, music and videos)
> automatically in the rotation so I always have at least 3 full dumps of
> everything (plus incrementals between) without having to remember to swap
> between different sets of tapes.
>
> If you run through a tape every single night then yeah, the tape reliability
> issue would come up a lot more often.  Reducing tape wear was among my top
> reasons for making these tweaks.  My next tweak will address an increasing
> problem:  it now takes too long for my backups to complete; I need to run 2
> tapes in parallel, get faster equipment, or throttle I/O so it doesn't swamp
> my file server during backups.
>
> I'll answer the Subject line once again:  eBay is the leading source for used
> tape equipment and media, that I've found.
>
> -rich
>
>
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-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available

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