Is anybody have successful backup Linux ES v.4 OS to DDS tape and recovery successfully

[walkman]

I have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES v.4 OS server, previous I want do OS backup to DVD, but I find the root filesystem is 14GB that it is unavailable to backup by DVD.so I want look for a backup solution that backup OS to DDS tapes and boot+restore by this tape once server OS corruption.
Thank you very much!

[Matti_Kurkela]

Booting from a tape is generally not supported in PC hardware. A basic tape drive cannot do it: you need a tape drive that has special support for booting a PC from a tape. It is done by having the tape drive emulate a CD-ROM/DVD to make the PC boot a restore program, then the program restores the rest of the tape content as normal. The boot tape must have a special structure, and only some backup programs can create a bootable tape.

You would be then tied to this specific technology: as there is no real standard for booting a PC from tape, different manufacturers' solutions might not be compatible with each other.

HP's technology for this is called One-Button Disaster Recovery (OBDR):

Introduction:
http://www.hp.com/go/obdr

Compatibility matrix:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/tape/OBDR/Compatibility_Matrices.pdf

It might be easier to re-arrange your filesystem layout so that your root filesystem (including your standard backup software) fits into a single bootable backup DVD. Restoring that would give you enough functionality to restore the rest of the system from multiple non-bootable DVDs, if necessary.

MK

[Steven McCoy]

I would highly suggest Mondo Rescue. It can span your system image across multiple ISO files/images. You can store them anywhere (tape, NFS share, CDs, etc), and then restore the system from them. I did a bare metal restore over NFS last week, smooth as silk.

http://www.mondorescue.org/

[Steven McCoy]

I forgot to mention that the restore process is handled from a bootable CD. You then tell it where to pull the ISO images from (tape, NFS share, CDs, etc). This is a much more compatible method for PC-style hardware.