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Hardware

Tape Backups for Personal Use, Using Linux? 32

Posted by Cliff from the you-do-make-backups,-right? dept.
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)
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Tape Backups for Personal Use, Using Linux? More

Tape Backups for Personal Use, Using Linux?

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  • I got a 30 gig DLT off eBay for $200 or so. The tapes are much more reliable, in my experience, than lousy DDS/DAT tapes and, unless you're willing to shell out for a DDS-4, there isn't much that can beat a DLT 2000XT.

    --
    Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

  • For home backup, you don't usually need to keep anything but an "I just got this new install working right" backup for any major length of time. So it sounds like the best thing is to do your full backups to IDE disks, and your incrementals to multi-session CD-R or to CD-RW (depending on how much stuff you change between incrementals).

    Do back up the system separately from /home. Do use at least two separate disks, and keep your "freshly-configured new install" backups on both/all of them. Do remove the backup disks from the computer when not making backups. Nothing like lightning toasting all your backups along with the computer because you left the hard disk in.

    You might want to do an incremental on /home every night, to somewhere on a different disk or system, to protect against single disk failure or accidental rm -rf. Or mirror the drives you change a lot more often than you want to back up. I've even had SCSI disks fail on me, and I don't think I was cooking them...
  • If you want cheap, why do you want 7200 RPM? You really won't miss the seek time, trust me. Right now, 5400 RPM 40G drives from Seagate and Quantum are $115 at a favorite (reputable) vendor of mine. The same price ($110) gets you 20G of 7200 RPM, or you can pay $150 for 40G of 7200 RPM.

    Me, I'd buy 2-3 drives no larger than $120, plus trays, and alternate between them. But you should size them for two full freshly-installed-system backups (e.g. the fresh 6.2 and the fresh 7.1), plus a couple full /home backups.

    Add space for your incrementals if you're not burning those to CD. Add space for your 'doze boxes if you're backing them up via a small linux partition.

    And be sure that if there's NFS mounting, it only flows one way. There is little more annoying than not being able to bring a box down cleanly because it has NFS mounts from a machine you've already shut down.
  • Sorry to be offtopic here, but do you not understand the meaning and purpose of "temp"?

    Anything important in /tmp deserves to be blown away.
  • This may sound like obvious advice, but what you should have done after you installed the tape drive and settled on a backup set was to check that you could actually restore!

    It's easy to accidentally get the backup set wrong and think you're backing up things which never get copied to the tape. Just make a backup and restore it to another directory and see if what you expect is really there. Do this somewhat regularly and replace your tapes (I do it every year, but perhaps it should be more often?). This way, you haven't waited until things break to see if they work at all.

  • I got a used (=cheap) DAT/DSS tape that works reliably for me. It only takes 2 GB (uncompressed) per cartridge, but a (90m) cartridge only comes around $3. Yes, that is about the same price range as CD-R, but tape is much more forgiving to load issues plus you do not need to change as often if you use e.g. GNU tar with the --multi-volume option. Plus the DATs are rewriteable/reusable.

    As sidenote the top record on my old 233MHz PC (SCSI and IDE): backup plus harddisc-recording plus MP3-coding plus burning a CD - all without problems, well, except slow interface response...

    Why DAT/DSS-1 (maybe -2) and not DLR, QIC or DAT/DSS-3? Simple: tapes and drives are much cheaper (single and per volume).

    As someone else noted: make sure to TEST your backups. I myself use GNU tar with the option --verify for this successfully (and --multi-volume, as said above). Additionally I check occasionally with friends wether my DATs still are compatible (i.e. properly adjusted) with their DATs - just in case...

  • I'm not having any problems with mine
  • RedHat Linux 7.0 kernel 2.4.2 with onstream driver support compiled in.

    Internal IDE 30 Gb

    I run a tar script based on the Linux System Administration backup chapter.

    I have downloaded flexbackup-0.9.8 to play with.

    I have tried restoring from tape - it works.
  • Why bother backing up then?

    If it is only every once in a while, why not use CD-R? Seriously, aside from the first backup you probably will not have to backup a large amount of data. Depends on your usage of course, but if once a month or so is acceptable for backups then I doubt there are significant amounts of data which change every day, or month.

    You should consider what it would take to plan the backups in such a way as to catagorize the CD-R's. Perhaps, after having a logical plan it will actually make more sense to do it that way anyway.

    (A backup of the installed os, a backup of the user structure, etc.)

  • Say what you may about the quality of their product, but OnStream still exists in form. Old company died, new company rises from the ashes. Basically the old company tanked and was restarted by old company's investors.

    http://www.onstream.com/index_data.html

    ----
  • You may be thinking of solaris, where sometimes /tmp and swap are on the same partition.

    Swap is on a completely seperate partition, untouchable and unviewable by users. It's my opinion that putting swap and /tmp on the same partition is not a great idea.

    Yes we can blow away /tmp at any time. Tmp is rather big (we originally used it to juggle around partitions for a disk upgrade a few years back). But all the users are friends, and we're pretty informal, and I'd rather not just delete a whole bunch of stuff - much of which belongs in /pub anyways. We just don't have time or motivation to go through it all and verify what works. Maybe one day. It's a bit messy but works just fine.
  • I don't want to have over 30 CD-R laying around per backup.

    A complete system backup (including system files, temp - lots of stuff in tmp, and pub would take well over 40GB).

    Once a month is just because I'm either too busy or lazy. People's home directories will change often. Once a month is only acceptable because this is to be done during my free time.

    Minimal plan is to backup /homes and /var.
  • That's why you put swap on a seperate partition. :-)
  • Yes I do understand the purpose of /tmp

    But our system needs and usage is different from the norm with respect to this.

    We use /tmp for basically storage outside those of user quotas on the home directory, where big things can be dropped. Like the iso for redhat7.

    Something I'd do on an enterprise, 5000 user machine? Nope. But we are not that. :) And things in there can be blown away, but if we're backing up, might as well get everything for the users.
  • What are you trying to back up? Pr0n? Warez?

    When I make a backup, I like to be sure that I can actually use my backup to restore the current situation in case of a disaster. And a disc crash is such a disaster and will eventually happen. So it doesn't make sense to back up some saved games here and some documents there. If you do that, you'll have to spend quite a lot of time installing your OS on a fresh system and restoring the backup after that.

    The backup I make (and I did mention both full and incremental), simply writes everything on my entire filesystem to tape. So if a crash occurs, all I have to do is boot from a specially prepared floppy, insert the correct tape and after a while I have the exact configuration back without a hassle.

    Even then, newer Plextor drives have BURN-PROOF technology, which steps down burn speed when the PC starts falling behind.

    Ok, I agree. But if you want to use such a (new) drive and CD-RW, you're absolutely going to spend more than I did.

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

    My machines hardly ever do work when I'm asleep, but there are enough people out there who have their machines work flat out all night. I always wondered what strange things Oracle was doing on my HP9000 machines at night. It was something with indexes, I was told by the DBA, but I sure know it was a lot of work. And compiling huge programs is something that goes better at night. May be a bad example, but when I was playing with kernel-compiles on an ancient 486, I preferred to start the compile before I went to bed.

    Well, a CDR could be a solution, but if you're going to buy something anyway, I'd still advise to go for a tapedrive. And I think most professional environments support me in this, because I've never seen a professional machine being backed up on a CD. Sure, a one-time backup of a Windoze box with Norton Ghost, but not a daily backup, meant to be a complete and up-to-date backup.

  • It doesn't matter if swap is on a seperate partition if you still keep using it for file storage instead of scratch space and memory paging. I think you have a fundemental mis-understanding of the way that /tmp works and what its purpose in life is. /tmp is not for storing RedHat CD images. But hey, who am I to tell someone who has root on some x86 box running the latest distro of RedHat what generally accepted methods of system administration are. You guys have everything under control, right?
  • By definition, space in /tmp may be wiped with no notice by system administrators. You'd be better off allocating less space to /tmp and more to user home directories. And you do know that when /tmp is full, you have no swap space? If all else fails make a /warez partition, set it mode 775, and put all users in a new group together.
  • You're right. Iomega's Peerless [iomega.com] supports only "Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, or MAC OS 8.6-9.X." with no linux mentioned on their Future page.

    To complain, fill out this form [iomega.com].
  • I bought a Seagate STT320000A 10GB (native) ATAPI Minicartridge Drive from Dell, used, for ~$150. It takes Travan TR5 tapes that Dell sells for $44. The install was a problem, as it came 100% documentation-free but for my lite needs it's worked fine, hardware-wise.

    Redhat 6.2 kernal has support builtin for the drive, so tar /dev/ht0 worked as soon as the tape drive was installed.

    I back up multiple machines at once by nfs mounting them from the pc w/the tape drive.

    Avoid the free Amanda backup program, as its medusa-like config is much too slippery. (I'm not a beginner but 2 weeks of work couldn't tame that beast.)

    I found that upgrading mt to 0.6 seems to make it work better re: its bsf/fsf commands (though still the file number stays at zero).

    Using tar, you probably want --ignore-failed-read and --verify. There is a --exclude option for names but i haven't found a way to simply leave out specific directory trees.

    I wrote alot of details on all of this, email me if you want them.

    If you don't need archival storage (eg, you don't have fear of crackers infecting your filesystem long before its discovered), you're probably better off just putting an old, monitor-less, fat-drived pc on your lan/router and backing up to that. For speed and ease of use.

    Unfortunately, Iomega's Peerless 20GB drive is only for Windows and Mac (OS8 & OS9).

  • My mom bought a VERY expensive Tape drive to back up about 200 megs of Software onto (They Computer Company she bought it from told her Zip Drives wear out quickly, and now, they are out of business, because they sucked so bad),
    So, she got this 250$ Tape backup system going, backing up every Friday. Finally, the fateful day came, and the computers HD crashed.
    So, I reinstalled windows on a fresh harddrive, And installed the Backup program.
    Lo and behold, you could not get a thing of the tapes. We tried everything. The only thing we could do was send them away to get analysed and burnt to Cd, but that cost like 2 grand.
    So she had to call out a professional to Get the crap of the old harddrive (the Windows file had corrupted, the Harddrive was still fine, I was only 11 at the time and didn't know).
    Even the Proffesional though couldn't get the stuff off the tapes.
    And, they were as slow as tar, it took 1 hour to back up about a gig.

    So, get an extra harddrive, stick it in every Friday, and run Norton ghost or something.
  • I got a 4MM DAT cheap, from work, we outgrew it. 120 meter tapes are are about $7 each. They hold about 3.7 GB uncompressed. I use Mandrake 8.0 but I also own Caldera. And Caldera comes with the free version of Personal BRU, an excellent backup program, it uses a proprietary format on the tape that calculates CRC's as it writes and automatically verifies that the tape is readable, it will verify volume1 before loading volume2 and then verify it before loading volume3 so you don't have to keep changing tapes back and forth. Nice program and it works great for me. I Mount my Windoze partition and back it up that way too, I blew it away once and put it back from tape and it worked perfectly. PK
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Um. Mr. pizza....

    Personal backup solution. Not enterprise.

    $3000 is a bit out of the personal product price range. :-)
  • Bloody 'ell, at that point, get an IDE RAID card, say from Promise, two identical drives, and do disk mirroring.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 [quantum.com]

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

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

  • 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 (Score:3)

    by ConsumedByTV ( 243497 ) on Sunday May 27, 2001 @03:53PM (#194545) Homepage
    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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