Tape Backups for Personal Use, Using Linux?

demaria asks: "As hard drives continue to grow, it's getting more difficult to back up important and not-as-important data. I run a small personal system (about 20 friends - not commercial) and have about 20gigs of data that I'd like to protect in case of disk crash, accidential deletions, or other forms of evil. I'm looking for people's experiences and problems with various personal backup systems under Linux. I can deal with downtime and changing tapes (such as using a 4G native tape). I'd consider CD-R except that I'd need about 30 of them, and I don't find them terribly reliable to begin with. Tape seems to be the cheapest medium. I'm only looking to do backups once every month or two, and only looking to spend about $200 on a drive (SCSI or IDE is fine, as is buying a used one), and no more than $50 on tapes per backup set. Can anyone recommend a good drive that'll work fine under Linux, and good backup software ? (if there's something better than tar -cf of course!)" After just losing a 30G HD due to a power supply surge, I too am in the market for such a solution. (And yes, I am kicking myself for not making backups, fortunately it was nothing critical...just Windows)

Comments

Cheap or Reliable?

[Detritus]

I think you are being very unrealistic if you think you can buy a decent tape drive for $200. I've bought a number of cheap (less than $500) QIC/Travan drives, and they all died after a year or two of doing weekly full backups. I've had better luck with the Exabyte 8mm drives I use at work, but they cost a lot more than $200. One nice thing about the 8mm drives is that the tapes are cheap, about $5 each for the 112M 5GB tapes that I use.

I currently use CD-RW drives to backup my computers at home. The drives and media are cheap and reliable. Changing CDs is a pain in the neck, but this can be alleviated if you use backup software that supports incremental backups.

Re:Don't use tapes

[Bryan Andersen]

With tape drives you get what you pay for. The cheep ones are just that, cheep. Go for the good quality drives, but they will set you back a few grand. On the otherhand they will operate flawlessly for years. I use a midrange DAT here at home, but it's old and dated. I bought it over a decade ago. I know I can read back all my tapes as I do a verify read after writing the tape out.

Now for doing cheep backups. Go with IDE disks in removable carriers. As another said, make a backup system. You don't even need to give it a monitor. Log into it over your local net. Get a bunch of 70+Gig hard disks and put them in carriers. Plug two in and backup to them, then remove then and store one off site.

You mentioned surge dammage. Where are your surge suppressors? UPS? Line conditioner? A transformer style line conditioner does alot for filter out spikes just by it's design. The power for my computers first goes into a line conditioner, then through the UPSes and finally power strips. Each stage has surge absorbers. Kinda a defence in depth. Kinda seams like overkill, but then I haven't lost computers when other in the building had all their electronics toasted. Yes I replaced the power equipment after that surge. The MOVs in the line conditioner let the magic smoke out.

Removable hard drives

[Snowfox]

IDE hard drives are so cheap these days that you may find you're better off getting a removable hard drive tray and backing up to that.

Benefits are - it's very fast, very reliable, cost effective, and you can very quickly access files in a random fashion.

I use a second system and back up over ethernet so I can power the second system off and swap out drives as need be. A cheap PC with a removable tray, two 75gb 7200 RPM IBM Deskstar drives, a network card and an extra monitor can be had for well under a grand.

Re:Removable hard drives

[SuiteSisterMary]

Bloody 'ell, at that point, get an IDE RAID card, say from Promise, two identical drives, and do disk mirroring.

eBay is your friend

[coyote-san]

I bought a DDS-2 tape drive on eBay a while back for a few hundred dollars. The magic phrase to watch for is that they're selling the equipment because their own backup needs have changed, not because of any problems.

Re:DLT + BRU

[demaria]

Um. Mr. pizza....

Personal backup solution. Not enterprise.

$3000 is a bit out of the personal product price range. :-)

CD-R, capacity, and multitasking

[yerricde]

A minor problem with CDs is that 600MB is not too much when making backups.

What are you trying to back up? Pr0n? Warez? Normally, I just archive those to CD-R and stuff them in the CD-ROM changer. Seriously, what type of 600MB data set on your workstation changes on a daily or even weekly basis?

But the real disadvantage is the chance of a failed write. If you burn, you'd better do nothing else with the machine.

I can't see how that'd be such a problem. Recent versions of Linux and Windows 2000 have soft realtime support, which guarantees that the burn process will get called at least once a second, which should be enough to keep a 2 MB buffer at 1200 KB/s (8x) full. Even then, newer Plextor drives have BURN-PROOF technology, which steps down burn speed when the PC starts falling behind.

Even then, what else (other than cracking RC5) are you going to be doing with your workstation while you're asleep?

And if something fails, you'll have to start over again, on a new disc of course.

Only with non-rewritable media. The newer CD-RW media can be written at 8x on newer drives.

To sum up, I'd recommend a Plextor CD-RW changer to help solve both the "650 MB is too small" problem and the "soda coaster" problem.

2nd hand tapedrive will do

[Woefdram]

At home I have a second hand Exabyte drive, 8mm. It may not be too fast and it can't write more than 5GB on a tape, but it works. I tried several methods (cpio, tar and dump) and dump proved to be the most convenient way to do it. At least for my needs.

A tape costs about $12 here. They're not too easy to find, most kiddies in smaller computer shops don't even know the name Exabyte, leave alone 8mm.

- I need an Exatape, 8mm, 112m please.
- Huh? Never seen those before, I have these...
- That's DDS, that's 4mm, that won't fit.
- Hmm, then what do 8mm tapes look like?
- Well, bigger for example... Never mind.
(Yup, this is a real-world conversation I've had twice already...)

But a colleague of mine found a bunch of those tapes that weren't being used anymore (most of them still shrink-wrapped) so now I make backups on this thing. Nice and smooth, I start dump just before I go to bed, next morning before I go to work I change the tapes and when I come home in the afternoon, everything's safe and sound on tape.

An incremental backup is a little trickier, at least in the way I do it. I'm Dutch, so I hate wasting tapes *grin*. So I simple made an index on the cassette and when an incremental backup is done, I record the position on the index. Next backup is simply started from that position. So I have 2 tapes for the full backup and 1 for several incremental ones.

Restoring is quite easy, dump's counterpart, restore, has the option -i, which makes it interactive. It's like having a shell and walking through your file system. Simply mark the files you want restored and presto...

The Exabyte works for me, but if I ever find a not-too-expensive DDS3-drive, I'll surely buy it. After all, DDS3 stores a lot more data on a tape that's easier to buy.

I don't think a CDR is a good solution for backups, although most sales guys in computer stores advise me to buy on from them ...because it's the best way to do backups. A minor problem with CDs is that 600MB is not too much when making backups. But the real disadvantage is the chance of a failed write. If you burn, you'd better do nothing else with the machine. And if something fails, you'll have to start over again, on a new disc of course.

If I were you, I'd go for a 2nd hand tapedrive. Be sure to check if you can get tapes for it, BTW. DDS2 or 3 should be close to ideal.

DLT + BRU

[green pizza]

The only tape drives I've ever had problems with have been the ghetto-cheap Best Buy discount aisle variety.

Get a decent tape drive:
http://www.quantum.com/Products/Quantum+l+DLTtape/ DLT+8000/Default.htm

And a decent app:
http://www.estinc.com/products.php

Or if perhaps you need a slightly larger tape "drive":
http://www.storagetek.com/products/tape/9310/

Re:I am in the same boat

[ConsumedByTV]

Could you give me your set up details?

• What OS?
• What Type of hard ware?

What size do you use? etc


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I am in the same boat

[ConsumedByTV]

I would stay as far as you can from onstream drives, as they went bust, you will be able to get their drives used. How ever their drives are really bad, worse then a Cd-r could ever be.


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