[H-GEN] Tape Drives

[Jason Henry Parker]

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Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org> writes:

> Ultimately, you'd like a full restore to be a case
> of:
> 
> 1.  Boot box from CD of your favourite OS.
> 2.  Partition hard drive.
> 3.  Put tape in tape drive.
> 4.  Issue relevant restore command.
> 5.  Get coffee because it's 2am (don't catastrophic failures always occur
>     in the early hours :)

Ultimately, yes.  In practice, full restores *should* happen rarely
enough that it won't matter too much.

Before I went on my trip in October I was asked to write a document
describing our backup system in as much detail as necessary to allow
the other sysadmin (Hi Brad!) to rebuild everything from scratch if it
came to that.  The scant documentation (covering the basics, assuming
a lot of knowledge or legwork beforehand) comes to 15 pages[1].

Six weeks later it became non-trivially out of date.

ObAMANDAPlug:  AMANDA stores a small (32k) header before every backup
               image on the tape which tells the operator what the
               next file is, and how to restore it by hand.  This is
               incredibly useful.

jason

[1] : And that's before I add the contents and index that I'd like to
      have, the transcripts of various sorts of restores, the addenda
      from the -users mailing list, the gotchas and bugs in various
      components, the idiosyncracies of ... well.  You get the idea.
-- 
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