[Rear-users] Backing up to tape-drive and OBDR

[Gratien D'haese]

Hi all,

Tape (OBDR) option was added to the wishlist in 2006 because it was a reflection of the functionalities mkcdrec had on-board.
On the other hand, since 2000 (mkcdrec) only a few people had questions about OBDR, so I personally think, it is not used almost anymore.
But, the good news OBDR functionality is very simple to add once the tape functionality is added to rear ;-)
Steps are:
1/ make a boot-able ISO9660 image on disk
2/ write the iso image made in step 1 to tape with some exta steps before and after
3/ make the tar, pax, star backup after the first tape marker

But, as Schlomo already indicated nobody asked about tape support since 2006.
For now, we better remove the tape (OBDR) text from our trunk sources to avoid confusion.

Kind regards,
Gratien D'haese 
IT3 Consultants 
gratien.dhaese at it3.be 
http://www.it3.be 

----- Originele e-mail  -----
Van: "Schlomo Schapiro" <schlomo at schapiro.org>
Aan: "Discussions about Relax & Recover" <rear-users at lists.sourceforge.net>
Verzonden: Woensdag 28 juli 2010 14:27:23 GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlijn / Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Wenen
Onderwerp: Re: [Rear-users] Backing up to tape-drive and OBDR

Hi,

I guess the README was a bit driven by wishful thinking...

I remember culling the OBDR stuff when I met it in the docs and website
but apparently I missed a few places.

Yes, I would also like to see it. But you should know that since 2006
when we release ReaR 1.0 you are the first person to ask about OBDR...

Do you want to use OBDR as a single-media DR solution for a single
server? Is this a place where using an external HD is out of the question?

Because otherwise I would suspect that much more people would benefit
from good support for bootable HDs with backup data on them than from
OBDR support...

BTW, in trunk we already have support for USBFS which you could try out.
I believe however that this code needs a medium rewrite before we can
release it as production stable. Amongst others it should use udev for
persistent device names and share more code with NETFS...

Kind Regards,
Schlomo

On 07/28/2010 12:00 PM, Dag Wieers wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The ReaR README states:
> 
>      The result is also a bootable image that is capable of booting via
>      PXE, DVD/CD and tape (OBDR).
> 
> But we don't see any real tape drive support (grep for TAPE_DEVICE in the 
> source-tree).
> 
> What's more the OBDR support can't really be functional. Doing a dd for 
> the padding is ok, but we don't see the ISO being writen to the 
> TAPE_DEVICE.
> 
> What we like to do is create a tape that is both the rescue media as well 
> as contains a complete backup of the system (could be TBs of data). 
> Currently ReaR does not seem to support both.
> 
> Using a tape-drive is not even an option for normal backup :-/
> 
> Has anyone already worked on that ? Why does it seem incomplete ? Any 
> advice ? :-)
> 
> Thanks in advance,
>