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Joachim Sauer
Asked: 2013-10-03 05:47:15 +0800 CST

Best format/approach for one-off backups to tapes?

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We're currently backing up quite a lot of data from different servers to a tape library using Amanda Backup and it works just fine.

Now I need a one-off backup of a specific set of files (in a location that's not otherwise backed up) to tape for long-time storage.

Obviously I could create a new Amanda configuration and just run that once, but that has several drawbacks, as restoring requires that configuration to be present or restored from the tape via a manual process (that's acceptable for the general backup but I don't think that's a good idea for a one-off).

What would be the best format for storing a backup on a tape, considering ease-of-restoring and (more importantly) not depending on external configuration data for the restoring process.

tape

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    For my money, tar, directly to the tape device - which is the normal way to use it, and one it does a great job with. It's been stable for a long, long time; as long as you have a drive that can read the media, you're very likely to be able to read the data off them.

    If you want to get fancy and manually set the blocking factor, to try to optimise write streaming and capacity, it can also be used through dd:

    cd / ; tar cf - . | dd of=/dev/nst0 bs=64k

    and record the blocking factor chosen on the tape case. Note also the use of relative paths, to avoid embedding absolute paths in the tarfile; GNU tar helps you avoid the trap with that (Sun tar used to force you to restore the data in the exact same location, if the paths were absolute), but it's wise not to dig holes for yourself even if you're sure you can later avoid them.

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