Re: backups of large IFS to tape

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I wonder if using Image Catalogs might work. Then you would be
backing up a blob instead of a bunch of small files.

I don't know anything about image catalogs, but from the sound of it,
this would be similar in principle to tar or other archiving formats.
Unix folks are of course familiar with tar, which presumably was
created for exactly this use (it means "Tape ARchive" after all). But
if you can trade some CPU time and temporary disk space for tape I/O
time and tape space, you can use a more modern compressed archive
format, like .zip or .7z.

I also like Nathan's idea of copying only new or changed files, which
is one of the main strategies used by dedicated backup software on
various platforms.

John Y.