Archiving
 

I have a large MP3 collection that I would like to back up to tape. I just bought a tape drive and I'm looking for an easy way to back up my library. I'd like to span the tape and compress the data. Its a Seagate STT20000A (TR-5 tapes).

I've poked through a couple of programs like Taper, Mondo, and Archeia, but they seem to be for system backups and I had a tough time getting them working.

Any ideas? A GUI would be nice, but not really mandatory.

I'm running Redhat 7.3 on a dual proc server.

tks

ark - gui based

CLI:

man tar

man gzip

(u'll tar it first then u'll gzip to compress).

hth.

Problem is that I don't have the space to tar them to first and then zip them. I need to stream them right to my tapes and span them across muliple tapes. I know tar -M can span, but it won't compress and span. I'll take a look at ark, but will it do what I need?

Have you tried this:
or you could stream it from gzip onto your tape, depending on how things are set up...

That would work on a single tape, as would "tar cvfz", but I need to span it across a few tapes.

Recap - I need to compress AND span about 50G of data to a few tapes (tape drive is /dev/ht0). I don't need a GUI, but it would be nice.

Any other tricks?

My mistake. You said you didn't have the space to tar them and then zip them, and I focused on that. I thought sending it through gzip on-the-fly would compress it enough for you so it could reside on the drive before going to tape. If so, then you could use the split command before sending it to each tape.

The only other thing I could think of would be to write a shell script to break the library up into more manageable pieces. In other words, many small archives rather than a single gargantuan one.

another 2Cents thrown in .... what compression do
you hope to gain zipping MP3? ;)

It's a highly optimized compression method in the
first place, and I doubt you'd gain more than 5%
anyway ...

Cheers,
Tink

You know, thats a good point. I didn't even think of that. The TR-5 tapes are listed as 10G/20G (10 uncomressed, 20 compressed), so I assumed I would need to compress my files to get the 20G. I guess I'll have to buy more tapes.

Now that that's settled ... :)

tar -L 10000000 cvf /dev/tape/ /my/mp3/collection

;)

Cheers,
Tink