On Sunday 28 January 2007 15:03, Kirk Strauser wrote:
>On Sunday 28 January 2007 12:55, you wrote:
>> If its already had 2 years use, its possible the heads may be worn
>> enough to fail on the higher density tape, Kirk.
>
>Great. For curiosity's sake, would it likely have worked (and still be
>working) if I'd switched to all brand-new DDS4 tapes from the start?
That is asking me to read tea leaves I think. The DS4 tape should be
smoother, and potentially less abrasive because of that, but without the
drive opened up to look at the head tips, and a really good microscope to
compare surface roughness of the 2 tapes, I don't think I'd be qualified
to even make a SWAG.
>vtape is interesting, but I still haven't convinced myself that spindles
> are the equal of tapes.
I look at it this way, if I lost the drive, I've lost the whole backup and
$150 to replace it. So I've already saved 3x the $100+ I was paying on
ebay for what were supposed to be brand new Seagate 4586n's, and I would
have lost, in bad tapes, 8 or 10 times as much data as I have now. That
was one tape at a time of course, this would be the whole maryann, but a
new drive partitioned and plugged in, would be, in 21 days, a who cares
shrug as that's the duration my vtape setup gives me. I'm cool unless I
lose all 3 drives at the same time. Much of what is precious to me is on
the corresponding directory of hdb, the old FC2 install.
The nice thing about vtapes is that the files are right there in front of
you for nothing more than an ls of that dir-slot in the event of a bare
metal recovery being needed, all I'd need would be to look at the data
link to get what vtape its linked to now, back up 6 days and start
unpacking the level 0's there with tar xzf. Write them down so you can
remember which will be an incremental on the next vtape, switch to it,
unpack the level 0's followed by the 1's, and repeat till your system is
restored and current as of last night.
One thing that should help considerably is my "genes-amanda-helper" script
kit, (its on zmanda.com) which I've been using in one form or another for
about 7 years now, and which appends to the backup tape, or writes to the
dir(vtape) in use, all the amanda configs and indices as they exist after
the end of that amdump or amflush backup run. Then you could do a bare
stripped install from a cd, use tar to recover those and then fire off
amrestore or amrecover. All the data needed for a full restore is then
at amanda's fingertips and it should be fairly painless.
Of course, because I said that, Murphy will come and visit, drinking all
my beer...
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
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