[H-GEN] Any recommendations for Tape Backup software ?

[David Jericho]

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Greg Black wrote:

> As I said, it depends on the hardware/firmware (and, to a lesser
> extent, on the OS).  There are many tapes that will eventually
> report an end of medium status -- but it's difficult to know,

Ah, this young learner understands now. Fortunately, I've never had the 
misfortune of having to support tape drives that don't return EOT.

Having said that, yes, my tests do include spanning onto the next tape.

> With the tape drives and OS variants at my disposal, I can
> demonstrate many cases where dump and tar can definitely not do
> it; I have no experience with Bacula, but it would impress me if
> it could manage this correctly.

I'm curious. Examples? I've had a lot of experience with backing up 
Solaris, Linux and Windows generally, I've had to do bare metal rebuilds 
on all three. Is it only the older OSes, or do newer ones have it too?

> I don't understand the point here.  Anyway, in case you were
> asking for more information, the reason I gave up on amanda was
> the difficulty of finding the right tape to use to restore a
> specific bit of data 

No, no slight against you was intended if that's how you read it, and it 
was more a chatty style comment than anything. I was merely saying that 
my dislike of Amanda on occasions has reached proportions only matched 
by my dislike of Sendmail, and I don't wish to subject the list en masse 
to my rants.[1] Some of my dislikes aren't rational, but the base of 
them all stems from rational sane reasons.

[1] My biggest rants are reserved for those in person.

-- 
David Jericho
Systems Administrator, Plugged In Software


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