> Bacula and Amanda are intended to be network backup solutions. But, you've
> chosen to use many instances of BackupPC over the network.

Actually there's only one instance of BackupPC.  We have one BackupPC
server, and about 200 clients.  It is an agent-less backup system that
uses rsync to transfer files.

> So, now you want
> to take a single large storage device and copy it to tape.

Well, actually I have several large storage devices to copy to tape.
This is just the first one I picked for testing.  There is another
partition that also has several million files on it, however not so
many hard links as we have with the BackupPC partition.

> I would say that
> both Bacula and Amanda are overkill for that (unless maybe you were already
> using one of them and just adding this device to their configuration).
> However, since you are dealing with millions of small files and "tons" of
> hard links, putting all that in an SQL database would seem to be
> particularly cumbersome for Bacula.

Indeed!  I ran our test backup for a few hours today and barely got
two gigabytes onto tape before giving up.

> A hard link is basically just a
> directory entry tied to an inode. You can have many such hard links with
> only one actual file. Each of those has to be recorded in the database. My
> guess is that that is where you are hitting the bottleneck.

Yes, this is exactly what the folks on the backuppc mailing list said as well.

> You haven't said what your OS is (some variant of UNIX/Linux I presume) and
> haven't spelled out what your tape environment is (some kind of LTO3 or
> similar library or drive I'm guessing).

It's CentOS 5 with an HP d2d4112 storage device, using fiber channel
connectivity.  The device emulates an LTO-4 tape drive with a tape
changer.

The next thing I'm going to try and to is see if I can simply tar the
entire raw partition onto tape.  Does bacula support this type of
backup?

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