Backing up to tape

[Frank Leonhardt (m)]

On 25 April 2018 19:10:02 BST, Sergey Matveev <stargrave at stargrave.org> wrote:
>*** Frank Leonhardt [2018-04-25 21:00]:
>>If I plug a SAS drive in to an HBA it'll just appear as /dev/sa0 (or
>similar)
>>- right?
>>
>>Then I can backup everything with tar -cf /dev/sa0 /* - right?
>>
>>Is anyone using tape able to confirm any of this one way or another?
>
>I have purchased Ultrium LTO5 SAS tape drive for several months ago and
>use it with HardenedBSD. Everything you wrote is right. It appears
>(connected through SAS HBA) as /dev/sa0, /dev/nsa0, /dev/esa0 and you
>can directly use tar with it without any problems. mt command allows
>you
>to rewind and seek records on the tape. And neither native tar supports
>multivolume archives nor tape drive will do anything with it -- you
>have
>to split volumes manually somehow. You can easily do something like:
>zfs send zroot > /dev/sa0 to write your ZFS dataset directly to the
>tape
>and then restore from it.

Thanks Sergey! Good to know the tape stuff still works. I've ordered a drive.

I'll need a utility to save/restore ZFS datasets that are larger than one tape if anyone knows of one. Otherwise I'll be writing one, if anyone is interested.

Regards, Frank.


-- 
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