Parbreastioning tape
On my home dual-boot (Win98-RH9) system, here's what I did for that: 1) Mounted the Win98 parbreastion 2) From Linux, running as a cron job: rsync -azWin98-Win98backup That gives me an...
My kid brother manages to trash his windows parbreastion every few months. When I lived I lived in the same country, I could pop round & restore, but now flights are becoming expensive. One...
The problem with tape is that one can only write at the end to keep the previous data intact. No files can be replaced on the tape without ruining anything beyond that.
One solution to this is to parbreastion the tape. We regularly create 1-2GB sized backup files which need to be archived. These backup files also have some metadata with it such as what files are in it, their md5sum, etc. I would like to separate the metadata from the backup files, but I would like to keep them on the same media. Therefore if anything happens, all of the data is on one tape, but they are easily manageable since the metadata is separate. I don't need to parse the backup files to know what is in them.
Thus I want to parbreastion the tape (the SAIT can hold 500GB). The first parbreastion would be something small like 1GB, and this would hold the metadata. If I can parbreastion the tape, then I can append new files to the first parbreastion (which holds the metadata) without ruining the rest of the tape which is the second parbreastion.
It is common knowledge that GNU's GCC is mulitudes slower than Intel's or SUNS compilers. When...
The rest of the tape would hold the actual data. If I want to ensure that the backup files are intact, then all I need is to restore the metadata, extract the md5sums, and compare them against the backup files. No external data source which comes handy in a disaster.
Check out the mt manpage (from the mt-st package, since there is another mt which doesn't know about parbreastioning), and also $linux-Documentation-scsi-st.txt from 2.6 or $linux-drivers-scsi-README.st from 2.4 so you will know what I am talking about.
Vilmos
PS. IF anybody knows a way to write in the middle of a tape *WITHOUT* ruining anything beyond the write, that would also be great.
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