Hi

I'm looking for a quick how-to or primer on using tape backup systems with Linux, plus some recommendations on Hardware. In an ideal world I'd like to buy a tape backup sytem that works out of the box with a gui interface on a debian based system

You probably haven't gotten any answers because your question is too vague. Are you backing up a single system, or several. How many GigaBytes do you need to backup? What type of tape drive were you considering? Do you have a SCSI bus on your system?

Backups are insurance. Just as there is no one life insurance policy that is appropriate for everyone, there is no one backup strategy that is appropriate for everyone.

Because of the naivete implied by the way you framed your question, I would suggest that you avoid tape for backups, and use a disk based backup scheme.

Mike Reubel posted a clever article that describes how make several weeks worth of backups tranparently available on a drive only marginally larger than the the original data drive:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

one system - 140GB IDE Hard Drive, though I can probably get away with just backing up user data in the home dirs amounting currently to about 24GB

they have a broken faulty IDE 30GB in what was a Windows 2000 Desktop machine. I was thinking of replacing it with this - http://shop.store.yahoo.com/a-c/cer20inidetr.html when I put a Linux system on the machine.

No

I don't know about naivete, I would have called it inexperience, anyway this seems to be the sort of thing I was looking for - http://www.linux-mag.com/2001-01/tape_drive_01.html, I'll keep in mind your comments about writing to disk as a backup measure.

thx

That is a good drive, I have used them myself under Linux with no problems.

Hard disks are useless as backup devices, why would you backup to the same type of device that you are suspect of in the first place? It is like printing 2 copies of a document because you are worried the paper it is printed on might catch fire.

Plus drives are heavy, expensive, fragile, and non-removable. The exact opposite of what you want in a backup solution.

Backing up to a second hdd can give you transparent access to your archived data, and provide low maintenance regularly scheduled backups.

I agree with your implication that a single event (e.g., power supply disaster) can take out both your target data and your archived data.

Effective backups take a careful evaluation of your backup needs and threats, and require discipline in carrying out whatever approach is deemed appropriate. irvken seemed to me to be asking for an "off the shelf" backup solution while providing very few details about his needs or setup - which raised a lot of red flags for me.

Don't know if this will help as I haven't solved everything myself yet, but here goes. I have set up a RAID 1 on the hard drives and I then have a tape backup unit.

Some may consider this overkill but I believe this approach to be a good idea for a few reasons:

The RAID 1 solution ensures that if a hard drive fails, everything is still running and gives you time to save your work and deal with the issue. In my case, I have to run around and yell at people to save their work and they keep saying 'just one more paragraph', 'let me finish this section' etc etc.

The second is that the tape allows me to take a backup of the system 'out of the office'. If there happened to be a fire or something, then having a fixed backup solution wouldn't be much use as both the original and the copy would be destroyed.

As for the tape drive, I simply ordered a 112T Tape Drive from Dell after my earlier Conner drive died. My old Conner was a great investment as it lasted me about 11 years. So far, I haven't got the Dell 112T working but that is really because I am trying to sort out a bunch of other issues first. I am also trying to find a nice tape backup software with a GUI or else, a Webmin module that will make doing the backup easy.

Please keep me posted on what solution you have come up with as I would be interested, particularly in the backup software you decide to use.
Cheers,