how to take incremental backup in tape drive
 

hello Guys,

i am having 1 tape drive and i want to take incremental backup of 5 folder in that tape drive on every friday.
but the location of 5 folder and the LTO (wehere it mounted) is different.

can Any know how to do this. Please help me.

thanks in advance..!!!!

Clarification:-
Is your backup from the tape drive to somewhere else, or
is
your backup to the tape drive from somewhere else?

Possibly you'd like to do a tape -> tape backup??

@ JeremyBoden thanks for Quick Reply..!!!!

I want to take the Incremental Backup of 5 folder to the tape drive(both folder and tape drive are in different server).

This suggestion seems too obvious - but could you:-
1. Take the incremental backup on the source server (perhaps tarring the files together).
2. Transfer it to the destination server,
3. Write it to the LTO.

I'm assuming you are not backing up full tapes via this method as this wouldn't really be feasible.

Can i Take the incremental backup files directly to the destination server..??? and then take it into LTO.

so there is not wastage of space in source server..if i do so then just tell me how..????

All this file transferring without confirmation that its worked, means that you need
to retain the files on the source server, until you know it's properly backed up on tape.
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Not tried it - but the following might work if you have a network connection.

You could set up NFS (Network File System) server/client processes on the two
servers, thereby gaining access to selected devices on the remote server.

I'm not convinced that it would be all that speedy though.
If the LTO can't operate in a proper streaming mode it could be very slow indeed.

It's quite a few years since I've used tape backups...

Big systems use expensive NAS/SAN setups.

IIRC backup applications like Amanda or Bacula can do this. But both packages are a complete backup framework. Only reading through the manuals and understanding them takes considerable time. Deploying this is not to be taken lightly, but it should work.

Depending how critical this is, it might be a much too heavyweight tool.

jlinkels

@JeremyBoden is there any script through which i can take incremental backup of folder to the remote host because i am not familiar with NFS.

@Jlinkels thank you for help..!!!!
which one is better for my problem Amanda or Bacula..???? and is there any other options so that i can do that without installing any software.(i mean Script)

Any backup method is going to need a way of transporting the data to the remote server.

How do you plan to label and rotate your tapes?
Whilst this is possible to do manually, it is virtually impossible to reliably.

The method you use depends upon how valuable the data is to you.
For modest amounts of data usage of "The Cloud" plus tape backups may be a simple solution,
provided you can write a script to track tape usage.

@JeremyBoden yes i need to transfer data to remote server but how i can transfer only incremental data from any local folder to remote server.

i don't understand your question fully but i have only 1 tape and want to do incremental backup on every friday and full backup on 1st of every month in the same tape.

I may be misunderstanding you here, but how many different tapes do you own for your LTO?
You need an absolute minimum of 7 tapes (5 for incremental backups, 2 for full monthly backups).
More would be better.
What happens if a tape gets destroyed?

I had assumed that you could identify your incremental data.
A full tape backup system could do this.
If you are backing up entire files, you could file identify changes (in a script say) by:-
1. Checking file modification date (probably OK),
2. Comparing checksums e.g. md5 against a list of previous checksums - pretty reliable.

You would transfer data between the servers using whatever method you use to move data around.

The backup software depends on how valuable the data is to you.

@JeremyBoden i am having only 1 tape in LTO and i want to take backup using norewind(/dev/nst0) method so that it will not overwrite already existing content. whenever we write in tape it will written in new file.

first i will take full backup using norewind(/dev/nst0) method and after that incremental backup in the same tape.

Do you trust your tape drive to never, ever chew up your tape?

What happens if your system fails half-way through a full backup?
Will you have any accessible backups?
Is your system secure against power failures?

It is simply not possible to get by with a single tape for any backup system.
It will fail eventually - probably when you most need it to work.

============================

Since you have two servers (hopefully completely independent ones), why not hold backups on the remote server disk storage?
It's very simple to do and rather more robust than appending backups to the end of backups.

sed 's/probably/exactly/g'

@JeremyBoden thank you for Suggestion. now i will use 7 tape for both incremental and full backup.

Now i am facing one more issue that i not able to take backup of file size more than 1MB. i dont know why but its showing me the following error;

xyz@localhost# tar -cvf /dev/nst0 file1.tar
file1.tar
tar: /dev/nst0: Cannot write: Input/output error
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now