Exabyte 221L Auto Loader

[Olivier Gautherot]

Hi Michael!

> Is there anyone using this device with FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x? I'm new to the
> world of auto-loaders and am curious if FreeBSD's tar / dump utilities can
> support it properly for backing up of 3tb of data from various partitions.
> If so, are there any specifics that I should be aware of when using this
> device? Any recommendations on using other software other than tar or dump
> to do this that are available in the ports tree?

rsync and rsnapshot are alternatives - I particularly like the second one as 
it provides a kind of incremental backup (you can have several snapshots of 
the same file, what can be handy to retrieve an old version of a file after a 
deadly edit without having the sysadmin fiddle with tapes...)

Regarding tar, make sure you don't save a huge file on an ext2fs file system. 
I did this mistake once on a machine that was shared between FreeBSD and 
Linux and I've lost a significant amount of data: ext2fs does not support 
files of more than 4GB (compressing the archive does not shift the threshold 
- data will be lost before this). UFS2 is the way to go: the inodes 
management is not quite as efficient from a disk usage point of view but for 
huge disks, it will bring you peace of mind, which is priceless.

Hope it helps
-- 
Olivier Gautherot
olivier at gautherot.net