[BBLISA] Definition of dump levels?

[John Stoffel]

Scott,

I'm going to cut to the chase and tell you to go and setup Bacula on
your system at work and stop screwing around with dump/tar/cpio and
whether to open your tape drives in SYSV or BSD style (i.e. rewind on
close).  

Just install Bacula, test the tapes with 'btape', test the jukebox
(using the base 'mtx' tool, then the Bacula mtx-changer script) and be
done with it.

There's a reason professional admins try to use better tools than
plain dump/tar/cpio these days, especially once backups start having
to span more than a single tape.  It's NOT trivial to get this right,
so just setup a tool which handles all this for you and don't worry
about it as much.

Now some people will complain and say that they don't trust any backup
tool which won't let them get their data back using 'mt' to position
the tape and then 'tar' to extract the data.  They're living in the
friggin past.  

As someone who's used Legato Networker for over 10 years now, I can't
recall any situations where Legato has failed to get my data back from
tape.  

I've been using Bacula now for a couple of years at home and it too
works extremely well.  It's got it's issues, but it does do a good
job, really.

Really, you're wasting a bunch of time on low level backup issues
which you should just punt to a tool which has done alot of the hard
work for you.  

John