"Jason Lohrenz" <jmlohren at citilink.com> wrote:
>
> I've been using Taper for my backups.
> I have an IDE Seagate TR-5 Tape drive (10/20GB)
> Aparantly Taper has problems with the latest Kernel (2.4.9-21).
> If I boot into 2.4.7-10 it works fine.
> Any suggestions on other backup methods?

I'm using Amanda to back up two systems (and I might add a third if I can
ever figure out how to get my laptop into a dump cycle -- that'd involve
it powering up in the middle of the night, checking if it's on AC power,
waiting for the dump to complete, and then suspending again).

Amanda is great if you don't mind the way it works, and can work around
the "can't have a dump bigger than a tape" problem.

I've got a DDS-3 drive at home, which holds 12GB native.  This is fine for
most of my system, but I had to divide up my big `media' partition into
separate subdirectories.  Amanda will let you exclude certain directories
from a dump, which is what I do.  A while back, I divided my music folders
into A-M and N-Z chunks, then used symlinks to emulate having them all in
one directory.  It works decently enough.

I was kind of scared of Amanda at first, but I just sat down and read
through the configuration file.  It was pretty easy to do, just took a
while.

For the most part, Amanda is fire-and-forget.  However, if you have a
catastrophic system failure (losing the disk your root partition is on,
for instance), it can be a pain to restore.  It's possible, since Amanda
just uses tar/gzip or whatever `dump' program is appropriate for your
system, but it can be difficult.

-- 
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
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