New backup tool for LTO tape drives

rsq

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 11, 2010
Messages
246
Hello *,

I have recently solved my backup problem and want to share my solution.

The problem:
I have 27 TB of data. not all of it is irreplaceable because most of it are rips of my bluray and vinyl collections. However, ripping all the discs takes a long time and I wanted to back up everything. Consider it a backup of the time investment made in ripping everything. Cloud backup is useless for data volumes of this size. HDD backup is expensive and cumbersome if you want the backups offsite.

I settled on used LTO-4 tape drives from ebay, connected to fibre channel. This is the sweet spot for price and capacity IMO. I was able to buy 50 tapes for 8 euros each, two tape drives for 200 euros and a fibre channel card for 25 euros. Total price for the backup solution was 625 euros and has a capacity of 40TB. External USB drives cant come close to this price.

The software:
  1. I tested bacula. It worked fine, but has some sides I am not comfortable with like the specific data format on the tapes. It is also complicated. Much more then needed for simple backup of a single server.
  2. I played with tar. It has the tape format I like, and the stability. I am sure I will be able to read tar files 10 years in the future because the current standard has literally existed for more then a decade. However tracking what is on what tape is difficult.
So I ended with hardware that could do the job, but no software...

Fortunately, I am a programmer! :cool:

I wrote my own software to wrap around tar and get the benefits of tar without the drawbacks. I hit V2 today and deem it sufficiently developed to offer it to whoever wants it.

The software can be had here:
https://github.com/erikvanhamme/filetools

Documentation:
https://github.com/erikvanhamme/filetools/wiki/backuptool

The tool is targeted to Linux users with working LTO tape drives. I imagine it is not hard to get running under the BSD's. Mac and Windows are more problematic.

If you are interested, give it a spin!

Best regards, Erik
 
Hi RSQ :)
One question here: where exactly you bought the drives from?
can you give me the links?
I am interested in buying such tape drives.

Thanks!
 
Although I am using bacula at work and at home I put your repository on the watch list.
 
Hi RSQ :)
One question here: where exactly you bought the drives from?
can you give me the links?
I am interested in buying such tape drives.

Thanks!

I am not sure where he bought his drives but ebay is a good place to search for them.
 
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