Proper tape backup software with file level restore

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perdrix

perdrix

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Mar 3, 2016
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I've been looking at the current crop of backup software and I am struggling to find what I want.

It shouldn't be hard as this used to be available back in the day when I was working in IT.

I want to be able to backup both Windows and Linux systems (for bonus points I'd like to backup an HP-UX server). Bare metal restore is a requirement (ideally to slightly different hardware).

Backup targets can be:

a) Network drive or external NAS/USB/Thunderbolt drive.
b) LTO tape drive with tape spanning and file level restore
c) D2D2T would be nice.

My current LTO4 is too small to do single tape backups for my laptop and the RAID array I use for archival and disk to disk backups is 26TB formatted capacity so definitely need tape spanning for that (no it's not full yet, but it has a lot of data on it).

Most sw won't do file level restore from tape at all :(, or requires restoring from tape to intermediate disk and thence to target disk.

Acronis Backup is not a great option - they have messed up too many times in the past for me to use them again.

David
 
perdrix

perdrix

Member
Mar 3, 2016
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OK not dagger cheap but about £150 a year for up to five systems is within reasonable limits.

Are there any good freeware options?
 
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oneplane

Well-Known Member
Jul 23, 2021
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I think Bareos can still do that. Not sure about windows support in that case, haven't tried for a while.
 
perdrix

perdrix

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Mar 3, 2016
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Unfortunately "Bare Metal Restore" of Windows systems isn't part of the Bareos offering. Some have tried to do it using WinPE CDs, but with mixed success.

If I have a need to do that sort of restore, I need it to "Just Work"(tm).

Amanda is great for Linux only sites but not a great option for me.
 
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sko

Active Member
Jun 11, 2021
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"bare metal windows restore" is a PITA anyways, especially in case of a (complete) hardware replacement...
Depending on how 'large scale'-ish this should be, an image dd'ed from a (generalized) master-installation + file-level backup of userdata (and/or making users store important data *exclusively* on network shares) may be the better/saner approach.

given that tape usually is one of the later/higher tier backup steps, there's usually only unix/linux involved (because bacups *have* to 'just work'™)
I usually use whatever works most reliably for the first step of aggregating data that should be backed up - this ranges from zfs snapshots to simple scripts or tools that just rsync (or whatever some windows tool might use) everything to a central storage server, from which the mid- and long-term backup systems sync further zfs snapshots and additionally write some selected filesystems to tape.
Never heard of anyone using tapes directly to back up client systems, but yes, this would be rather tedious to get working with amanda (or bacula or any other tape-centered backup solution...)
 
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oneplane

Well-Known Member
Jul 23, 2021
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I wouldn't recommend a bare metal windows restore in any case; make you automation on setting up a windows-based device good enough and separate the actual data you want to keep and put that in your backups.

If that is not what you want, you're probably not going to find a cheap solution that does what you do want, purely because of the ongoing engineering erffort involved in such a scenario.

Ironically, most windows full disk backup and restore solutions just do a shadow copy disk clone, but those are still NTFS and as such is a PITA to "browse" from non-random non-block storage, especially linear tape.
 
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