[ Date Index ][
Thread Index ]
[ <= Previous by date /
thread ]
[ Next by date /
thread => ]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday 16 April 2004 9:20 pm, Simon Waters wrote:
I thought we'd established Dave has a perfectly good tape drive..... I bought a dirt cheap tape drive that does 15GB uncompressed per tape, or around 30GB a tape with on-the-fly compression. Although not as solid a technology as DDS3 (at least in theory), it seems to work pretty well.
The DDS-3 drive set me back £39 from ebay and it's brilliant for the money. Haven't yet had a single file fail on verification, something that most certainly would have happened writing 12Gb to cheap CDs about 45 times. It's rated at 12Gb/24Gb native/compressed. The drive has *hardware* compression, hence using compression in afio doesn't make a huge deal of difference.
I'm a big fan of backing up everything you can on one tape whereever possible, seen too much grief through one failed tape in a set, and a nice simple restore procedure works wonders for one's confidence in actualy bein able to do a restore.
Yup... the reason why I was using afio.
I'd be tempted to try squirting it through a better compression
algorithmn (gzip? bzip? compress?) and see if it all fits on tape, since
a temporary use of less than 12GB of disk space shouldn't be an issue.
Apologies if Dave already tried this - although there are increased
issues with corruption potentially. Copy the file hierarchy and compress
that before tar'ing ("compress -R" style IIRC) should minimise the
corruption issue.
If you use compression with afio then it compresses each file individually, as your suggesting to reduce the possibility of corruption. I've not been using afio compression (it uses gzip) though as it doesn't make much impact on data sizes down to: 1) The hardware compression of the DDS drive 2) The fact that most of my large files are already bzipped or gzipped spam corpora. Unforunately I'm also stuck for using temporary disk space. My NFS /home server has a 20gb disk only, and is of a vintage that it won't accept disks of above 32Gb without having them clipped down to that magic number. This will be remedied when I finish my degree and have a bit more cash. The tob scripts obtained from apt-get install tob seem to look like they will work for me at the moment with regards to incremental backups and multi-volume full backups. I fully intend to re-arrange my data so that I have a much smaller amount of data for regular backup with static data archived to CD-R. Again this is something for after my degree is done and dusted :-) - -- Dave Trudgian - Cornish Dave - ---------------------------- [w] www.trudgian.net [e] dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx [j] trudgiad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAgF8xt+PdOLWW6O4RAjJ7AJ4zmXvYMEj0Dt13L/Or/iplP3rklgCeOKV9 zF4XruUAk3tb1cfeF+G31bw= =3GrR -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.