[H-GEN] DVD Backup & burning software under Linux

[Greg Black]

On 2004-06-11, Stuart Longland wrote:

> An idea hit me the other night, is it possible to create the tar files
> for incremental backups, then cat them to the tape?

Yes, although the canonical tool for this is dd(1), not cat(1).
You'll also need to manage the data you put on the tapes if you
do this -- at urgent restore time, it's not amusing to have to
fuck around for hours finding the file you needed on the tape;
you need to be able to seek to the one you want with mt(1) and
work from there.  The reason tools like amanda exist is to help
you manage all this stuff rather than writing your own scripts
which will turn out to have bugs that you won't discover until
it's a real pita.

> 5. I saw Greg's comment reguarding the quality of these units ... at
> least it's a step above the QIC-40/80 & Travan tape drives.  And it's
> certainly better than what they have -- next to none. :-/

You may have seen the comment, but it would appear that I didn't
make myself clear as you didn't understand it.  Be sure that you
understand that bad/faulty/broken backup media/drives are much
worse than nothing -- if you know you have nothing, then you act
accordingly; if you believe that you have backups and then
discover at the wrong time that you don't, then people will want
to shoot you.  This is not at all nice and it's not a good time
to have to explain stuff.

And, for the purpose of this discussion, DDS-2 drives are just
junk and belong in the dumpster.  They are notorious for failing
in two disastrous ways.  They write data that no other drive in
the universe will read -- you discover this when your drive
fails and you try to read your backups with a different unit.
And they sometimes write data that they can't even read back on
the same drive the next day.  And they just fail completely if
you use them regularly.  If you have data that would cost more
than $1k to replace (and that means very little data), then it's
worth at least a DDS-3 drive.

Cheers, Greg
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