On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 at 12:06, rmluglist2--- via Hampshire <hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote: > > Hi all > Coming back to a topic I raised a few months ago… > I’ve been trying to get a write-once-read-many backup using tape. Trouble > is – it keeps failing. It’s a fair old amount of data to backup (20+Tb) but > I think one of the issues is I’m trying: > tar czvf /dev/nst0 /path/to/data > Googling tells me tar’s max file size is 8Gb and my files to be backed up > (which are highly compressed anyway) are all around 8Gb – hence even only 2 > of them will create a tar file over 8Gb. I’m happy to remove the z so > remove compression but is the way to this really (seems awfully clunky)_ to > write a script to supply each file to be archived as the second argument to > the command above. So my tapes will end up with 500 .tar files if I have > 500 files to compress? Doing it as one .tar file – or even one .tar per > directory is going to result in .tar files of over 200Gb so possibly the > reason for the errors. > If anyone’s wondering what error codes I’m getting, it’s usually “file too > big” (I’m paraphrasing). > Lastly – I’ve not found any decent GUI based (free) software to do this. > Grsync didn’t seem to like my tape drive – not sure why >
I am sure this problem has been solved before. Are you reinventing the wheel in some way? I found that open source backup software like "bacula" has solved all these sorts of problems. Is there a specific reason why you don't wish to use tried and tested backup software? https://www.bacula.org/ Kind Regards James -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Manage subscription: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG website: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
