[OpenAFS] backup suggestions

[Thomas E. Keiser]

Hi,

We have a fairly new cell that is starting to grow rapidly, and backup is
becoming a big issue.  My major concern is that we already have a few
volumes >10GB in size.  From what I've read in the documentation, it
appears that butc is incapable of spanning volumes across several tapes.
This is going to be a serious isue in my facility since our tape library
has dlt 4000 tape drives in it, so volumes considerably larger than 20GB
will eventually overrun the compressed capacity of a single tape.  Is
there any method of backing up large volumes without buying all new tape
hardware?  The problem is that we have a couple of public webspaces and
user homedirs that are extremely large.

I hear lots of people complaining about butc being inadequate.  Is anyone
actively working on improving it?  I've been toying with the idea of using
butc file mode dumping into something like HSM, (I was thinking of sun's
sam-fs) to manage backup migration onto tape.  By the way, is anybody
doing backup into HSM, or are the licensing costs considered too high?

Before anyone mentions TSM, we've pretty well ruled out that option.
Tivoli considers my organization too small to bother with, and management
here doesn't want to pay the rates charged by the university central
computing group for access to their TSM system.

Thanks in advance,

____________________________________________________
Tom Keiser
Senior UNIX and Network Systems Administrator
The Center for Engineering Design & Entrepreneurship
213Q Hammond Building
tkeiser@cede.psu.edu