Best tape backup software

[Longman, Bill]

> I'm trying out a tape backup solution for my server.  More of 
> an experiment to
> see how I like it than a long term plan.  Even so...
> 
> I've done a search for good utilities and haven't come across 
> anything that
> thrills me.  What I want is something that's easy to 
> configure, hopefully with
> an interface of some sort, not just command line.  I want to 
> do a daily
> rotation of tapes like I used to do in the old Jumbo 250 days 
> - a full backup
> at the beginning of the month, and incrementals daily 
> thereafter, rotating 2 or
> more tapes.  I want to get it fully scheduled so that I don't 
> have to think
> about erasing tapes at the beginning of the month, and of 
> course there should
> be some sort of notification if there are errors or when the 
> tape is running
> out of space.  Locating the most recent version of a file on 
> a tape or backup
> set should be easy and intuitive.
> 
> I am aware that many simply use tar, but for some reason feel 
> more comfortable
> with something structured - mostly because I suspect restores 
> will be easier if
> there's a program actually managing the backups.
> 
> FWIW, I've toyed the last month with taper, but the interface 
> is buggy and it
> lowers my confidence, and I've also looked at cpio.  What 
> else is there?  I
> much prefer nicely written GUIs.

The one thing I like about the dump utilities are their ability to easily
manage incremental backups. You might want to take a look at
http://dump.sf.net and give it a try (I'm assuming you're using ext2). I
haven't used it on YDL since I have only one machine and I really don't even
need to back it up.

Bill