Re: scsi tape drive - debian package
<posted & mailed>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I recently attached a SCSI tape drive to my raid box running Debian.
> It's a SONY Model: SDX-300C
>
> I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction on how to get
> it working, backing up.
> I had a look at Amanda, that looked very complicated for me !
>
> Is there a simpler software package ?
Try tar. When I first got my tape drive, I tried a lot of fancy graphical
backup utilities: Perfect Backup, Arkeia, and others. But like you, my
needs are simple. In the end I just wrote a shell script to call tar.
It's completely adequate for my needs.
Remember, the most important thing a tape drive can do is to protect you in
case of catastrophe, i.e. hard disk crash. In that event, you may not have
X working, you may be working in a very minimal environment after booting
from a rescue disk. tar will be there for you, but will you be able to run
Arkeia or Amanda?
While we're on the subject, consider building a custom rescue CDROM. There
are several of them out there. I followed and modified the instructions at
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~purschke/RescueCD/, with good results. With one
of these you can boot your system from CD and be in a good position to call
tar to get your files back.
Good luck!
Andrew.
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