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

[Dag Wieers]

On Wed, 28 Jul 2010, Schlomo Schapiro wrote:

> 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...

But we selected Rear for a number of reasons, one was OBDR support and now 
we discover it's not really functional :-/ Not that we had a lot of 
options...


> 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?

I wish I could decide that, but that's not how things work around here. My 
solution would have been very different ;-) Fact is that these systems 
have been bought with a tape drive in each (think thousand systems in a 
few hundred locations) and one of the decided workflows is that a single 
tape backup can be made in order to restore and troubleshoot it locally.

Not sure how often that will happen, but alas...


> 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...

Our second scenario for real D&R could make use of it, but I fear they are 
going to rely on tapes (and only tapes) again.

Thanks for the information though !

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]