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

[Greg Black]

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On 2003-11-10, David Jericho wrote:
> 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?

It really is a combination of tape drive hardware and firmware
and it's the specific drives that are at the heart of the
problem.  I have observed it with DC-150 and similar drives,
DDS-1 and DDS-3 drives, and with a few others that I can't name
reliably.  I'm pretty sure that current BSD and SysV systems
will have problems with those drives, but I put 99% of the blame
with the drives.

It's ages since I've done any specific testing, as I use my own
software to manage all data going to all tapes -- it was written
to work around any conceivable issues on any kind of drive and
works just fine, so I don't have to bother about these sorts of
problems any more.  It's effectively a clever version of dd that
just sits between dump or tar and the tape device and is used to
both write and read the tapes.

> I was merely saying that 
> my dislike of Amanda on occasions has reached proportions only matched 
> by my dislike of Sendmail [...]

Ah, I see; I have to confess to similar dislikes of both of
those tools.

> Some of my dislikes aren't rational, but the base of 
> them all stems from rational sane reasons.

I could have said that myself :-)

Cheers, Greg

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