How to copy from tape to tape on different sytems?

[Randy Hagedorn]

Hello,
We have two K460 systems each with an internal tape drive. We would like to create an unattended tape copy of our nighly backup. We think that one way to do this is to copy from one system's tape to tape on another system. Is this a possibility or is it best to simply have two tape drives on a single box?

Thanks in advance. Dewy

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Duwayne,

If you want to copy from one tape to another tape with both the tapes on different system, you should remeber that it would be using the network to do that and will be much slower. How much of data are you talking about?.

A few 100MB or a few Gig might be okay, but if it is in double digit Gigs, you should look for another alternative since you are talking about every night and not once in a while.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi DuWayne:

I'd opt for using 'fbackup' with the '-f machine:device' option. This will work with DDS tapes. See the 'fbackup' man pages for more details.

Regards!

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If speed is an issue then clearly both tape drives on the same box is the way to go. You can certainly do this over the network as well using tar or cpio pipelines to a remsh command.

While not exactly, a tape to tape copy one other method would be to run 2 fbackups at the same time. One would go the the local tape drive and the other would go the the remote tape drive. Both backups could use exactly the same graph file. Since fbackup already knows how to access remote tape drives, this would be the easiest method.

Your other option (though not free) is to use OmniBack, omnimcopy from one machine to the other is very easy.

Regards, Clay