Backup Software for *nix

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
Joined
Nov 8, 2006
Messages
3,358
Location
Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
Hi Guys,

I've been hunting for a backup utility that's a bit more user friendly than the old 'tar' utility. (I'm running FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE).

It's for a single workstation with local tape drive (/dev/sa0). Backup set is about 12GB of critical data (email, application source code, personal pics, etc), or 150GB for complete archival data, eg game data, application downloads, pic's, mp3s and movies (aka pr0n). This is a single user PC.

Tape drive is a VXA-1 int SCSI drive on a AHA-39160 controller. Local drives are SCSI RAID (3x 36GB on a ASR-2120S) and a 400GB IDE drive.

I've looked at Amanda, but seems overkill for my situation. Ideally, I just need something inline with ntbackup, (I use ntbackup when running WinXP, don't need anything more). Just enough to select files/folders and let me know size of the total backup, and estimated progress. Don't need to script/schedule the backup as backups are done when I remember to do them, well critical data is done weekly/fortnightly depending on my pc usage, it's the full archive that I only do every 3-6 months... ;-) PC doesn't run 24/7, only when I'm using it.

To be honest, I don't care if the utility is a front-end to 'tar', just needs to be able to handle multi-volume backups correctly and be able to report progress.

Any recommendations??? (I've searched freshports with little success).

Also, anyone know a way to see the current I/O rate for the tape drive? (Just want to make sure I'm feeding the drive quick enough).

PS. For critical data I just do a:
# du -c -h /home /root /etc /mnt/data2 |tail -n 2
to get the backup size, and then
# gtar -cMvf /dev/nsa0 /home /root /etc /mnt/data2
to perform the backup. (BSD tar doesn't support multi-volumes, but GNU tar does? eg -M switch). Then...
# mt rewoffl
to eject the tape
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
22,297
Location
I am omnipresent
Well, TrueImage exists as a Linux product.
Or you could maybe look into Catus Software's Lone Tar, which I think is just a tar frontend.
 

blakerwry

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Oct 12, 2002
Messages
4,203
Location
Kansas City, USA
Website
justblake.com
Since tape drives are typically seen as character devices, they are rather limited with respect to the tools available to access/monitor them. However, iostat (part of the sysstat package) will let you monitor the block devices that the data is being read from. This should let you determine how much is being written to the tape drive.


# see kb read/written per partition (averaged over 5 seconds)
iostat -p -k 5

# See detailed stats per block device (averaged over 5 seconds)
iostat -x 5


you can also look at dmesg or your boot log to determine the SCSI interface speed that your tape drive is negotiating at. Most adaptec scsi cards also tell you this information in /proc/scsi/aic7xxx, though this is dependent on card/driver/os.
 
Top