>How easy are these other backup systems to implement? Are any of them Open
>Source like tar? The advantage of tarballs is that any linux box can read
>them.
Taper is nice because it provides a DOS-like interface through the ncurses
library, although you can also setup taper for unattended backups. Taper
can save backup sets, it supports a cpu friendly compression scheme and it's
also open source. The big advantage taper has over tar is that it saves a
local copy of the archive file list on the hard drive, which can save a
tremendous amount of time if you wish to recover a single file. TAR has to
read though the archive sequentially to find a file, which can take awhile
if you have a slow tape drive.
Real life example: When updating the samba RPM, my samba.conf file was
replaced with a default config file. Rather than redoing it, I used taper
to restore that single file into my home directory, where I could use it as
a basis for a new samba.conf file. Because taper saves the file list on the
hard drive, it was able to _fast forward_ the tape to the file, recovering
it in under 5 minutes. It takes about 3 hours to backup my system, and
since tar has to read the entire tape as it goes to find the file, it's
conceivable the same restore job could have taken hours.
Here's the taper webpage. Make sure you get 6.9a, as earlier versions seem
to have trouble with the 2.2 kernels.
http://www.omen.net.au/~yusuf/
The other program I mentioned is similar to tar but uses a compression
scheme that is not as error prone as tar's by compressing files
individually. I don't use this program myself, so you will have to ask
others for more information.
Even though I like taper, I still keep a tape around just for tar usage
because it's quite handy sometimes. It's also easier to trouble shoot
problems with a "simple" program like tar.
Douglas Bollinger
Mt. Holly Springs, PA 17065
My other computer runs Linux.
