On 13/08/09, Charles Curley (charlescurley AT charlescurley DOT com) wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:08:03 -0400
> Jon LaBadie <jon AT jgcomp DOT com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 06:17:17PM -0400, rorycl wrote:

> > So maybe you should provide a complete OS distribution, including the
> > backup software.  Like a customized version of one of the "live CD"
> > releases of Linux.  But wait, will that distribution's included
> > device drivers work on the devices that will exist in 12 years?  Will
> > that era's computers still have CD drives.  Will they be bootable?
> 
> Oh, folks 12 years hence ought to be able to dig out 12 year old
> computers to run their 12 year old distributions on. 

Many thanks for this note, Charles, and to the other notes Chris,
Charles and Jon about their commentary about using Amanda to provide a
long-term archive format. The points about being able to use standard
Unix tools to retrieve information is well made, as is the point that
the current machines and architectures (and CDs!) may not be around in
12 years' time. Thanks very much for those observations. 

I'd like to return the other part of my question if I may:

> The backup tape format is to be LT04 and we have a second-hand Dell
> PowerVault 124T 16 tape autoloader to work with currently. Backup from
> a pool may be taken off a Linux LVM (or hopefully soon a BTRFS)
> snapshot ensuring that the source data does not change during the
> backup process. We have the possibility of pre-preparing backup or
> compressed images if this is advisable.

I'd be grateful to learn specifically if the approach I have set out
seems feasible. Also:
                     
    - is the snapshot volume or secondary holding pool advisable?
    - is compression / deduplication possible?                   
    - after scanning through the wiki I can't see any references to what
      I think of as a backup job "catalogue". How does one know what    
      files were part of a particular backup job?                   

Thanks for any further advice.

Rory

-- 
Rory Campbell-Lange
Director
rory AT campbell-lange DOT net

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