[ale] Anyone here who is good with kernel programming?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 02/13/2010 09:47 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Maybe it's just me but using existing well understood tools for each
> part of a process chain seems far less kludgy to me.

Which is why I'd like to use tar---it's well-known, well-understood, 
portable (enough), and media that houses direct tar archives (be that 
floppy, tape, or optical disc) is readable on every UNIX and UNIX-like 
system that I know of.  In theory optical media without a filesystem and 
with a tar on it should be readable on any UNIX unless it does something 
stupid like do filesystem interpretation on the device node itself, 
which I should think is against the UNIX philosophy anyway.  But for the 
systems that matter in every practical situation I've encountered in the 
last five years, direct tar on optical disc works perfectly fine---and 
then restoration doesn't even require root privilege on the server if 
users can "tar xf /dev/sr0 some-important-file.txt" or so.

> So step one generates the backed up data on maneagable chunks for the
> proposed output process. Step two prepares that set for storage. Step
> writes to media.
 >
> I HIGHLY recommend looking at a complete backup solution like bacula.
> The backup is only 1% of the problem. The restore is the only part that
> matters.R

I agree with you 100%.  That's why I find it insanely easy to be able to 
treat an optical disc like a tape.  Then, knowledge of tapes transfers 
over, and if $CLIENT decides that they'll actually wind up using tapes 
at some point, the same tools can be used without modification---the 
only difference then is that you're swapping tapes, not discs.

> Using power controls on a series of raid10 drives as primary backup
> storage can greatly extend the drive life. Then using DVD-RW as off-site
> archival rotation and bare metal recovery of the backup server makes
> sense to me.

I can't say that I'd ever consider using RAID anything as a means of 
backup---just as a means to know when to drop a new drive into the 
system.  Maybe I'm nuts, but I don't consider a backup to be a backup if 
it's still in the same system.  I of course also do not consider any 
backup plan to be complete without off-site backups being part of the 
deal, but I'd never call RAID a backup of any means.  It's just a means 
to prevent immediate loss due to drive failure(s).

> Did I mention bacula has the best documentation of any open source
> project I have ever seen? And it can send notification emails of status
> and now has a web gui dashboard for non tech management use.

I'll take a look at it.  But still, for somewhat simple setups, I think 
that a "backup management system" might be overkill.  It's like saying, 
"Hey, let's use Nagios to monitor this single system on a network of 
five nodes," when all you really need to do is know, "It's down," and 
have a plan for being back up in 10 minutes or less.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                    Blog: http://mike.trausch.us/blog/
Tel: (404) 592-5746 x1                            Email: mike at trausch.us