[CLUE-Tech] Tape Drives - why?

[Nate Duehr]

On Thursday 29 July 2004 14:48, Adam Bultman wrote:

> Interesting thing to note here, is what I'm told is a new 'paradigm' in
> backing up (something I might actually try sometime in the near
> future):  Evidently some people have been buying a couple large hard
> drives, backing up to those, and then using the tape to back up that -

This is basically what large disk array manufacturers have offered for 
years... folks like EMC, etc.  The marketing departments are just cranked up 
again about it.

At one place I worked, they put all the data on a highly redundant network 
file server from Network Appliance and then streamed that off to AIT-3 tapes 
in a carousel, as an example.  Backups of anything were only limited by their 
network speed, really, if the servers could saturate a 100 Mb/s switched 
network port.  They had a few servers (database) connected to the NetApp with 
fiber.

So while not really a "new" paradigm, it certainly is "do-able".  

The fancy (read: expensive) devices have Terrabytes of online RAID-5'ed (or 
better) disk storage and can handle the tape drive themselves.  The 
do-it-yourself person can simulate that pretty easily.

Along these lines... does anyone know if any of the mainstream or 
semi-mainstream linux filesystems support taking filesystem snapshots?  
Snapshots make backups rediculously easy... quiet the filesystem, snapshot, 
"un-quiet" the filesystem, backup snapshot to tape...

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com