[ale] Bacula

[Stephan Uphoff]

Dow Hurst wrote:
> I am currently concerned with our backup process right now 
> since we've outgrown the DDS3 tape drive I have.  It takes 10-11 compressed 
> xfsdump formatted DDS3 tapes to get our single filesystem of everyone's home 
> directories backed up.  Shoving that many tapes at minimum 6 hours per tape 
> ends up being practically a week for a single level zero backup.  I need 
> another identical tape drive so I can stream to two drives.

Mhhh ... I think a DDS3 drive writes 1.2MB/s (2.4 compresses) to a tape
that is 12G (24G compressed). A streaming write of the whole tape should
take less than 3 hours.
Unless I have the wrong data this indicates that your xfsdump is not streaming.
( Do you head the tape stopping,rewinding a bit, starting ..?)
It would probably be worthwhile to play with the tape buffering values and
to research dd like programs with deep buffers.
Since DDS tapes survive only a really small number of head-passes streaming also
helps preserving them.

If you need to buy a tape drive look for DDS alternatives - they are a bit
more expensive - but a lot more reliable,faster and have decent capacities (DLT,..)

	Stephan