Tapeback - Tape backup software
for Linux
by Ron Gage

First, the important stuff: tapeback can be downloaded from my FTP site.

Latest news:

This just in - - - Tapeback has had some initial yet successful testing on a DLT-7000, a DLT-8000, and an SDLT-220 drive. Tape spanning has not yet been tested on these drives yet. Stay tuned...

Future plans include giving you the ability to restore a single file in a backup - including multi-tape backups. I also intend to include extensive logging options and hopefully, I will also be able to get tape changer support going.

Tapeback is open source software, licensed for use under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Tapeback is copyright (c) 2004 by Ron Gage, with portions copyrighted by Kai Makisara (the guy who wrote the Linux Scsi Tape driver and the userspace ST utility).

Tapeback is a general purpose tape backup and restore utility set that supports modern SCSI based tape drives. The tapeback utility set also includes a kernel patch (should work on both recent 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels) to facilitate real-time tape load status reporting. Tapeback supports the following features:

• Works with any size tape drive
• Can append backups to existing tapes - no more wasteful 5 gig backups on 40 gig tapes
• Backups can span multiple tapes as needed
• Support for Full, Incremental and Differential backups
• No Database needed for a backup or a restore
• CLI based utility can be run from a rescue CD (quick and easy disaster recovery)
• Minimal user intervention needed during backup and restore
• File system agnostic - should be able to backup/restore any Linux based filesystem
• Easy restore point redirection

What features would YOU like to see in tapeback? What do you consider to be a "must have" in a tape backup/restore solution? Where do you see tapeback meeting (or failing to meet) your needs? Please let me know what you think tapeback needs.

Tapeback is currently known to work on a SCSI-2 DLT-4000 tape drive (it's the only drive I have access to right now). If you have any information about other tape drives that tapeback works on, I would love to hear from you. Please email me your testing results.

For more information about tapeback, please feel free to email the author.

Installing tapeback
Tapeback is easily installed. Unpack the tar archive, change into the tapeback directory, and type "make && make install".

Installing the kernel patches requires that you (obviously) have the kernel source installed on your computer. Change into the base directory for the kernel source and install the patches like so:

cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.6
patch -p0 < /path/to/tapeback/st.patch
patch -p0 < /path/to/tapeback/mtio.patch

Once these patches are installed, go on with rebuilding and installing the new kernel. Reboot the machine to put the newly patched kernel into use.

At this point, tapeback is ready to run.