LTO Backup in 2022

[paulinventome]

Hello,

I've searched but most threads I found are really old so I don't know what the current state of play is.

I use LTO 8 for archiving footage, literally the only way you can realistically do it. I run a SAS drive off a separate machine now and obviously can still do this but I had a crazy idea whether I could run the LTO drive and backup from TrueNAS 13. Whether there are plug ins or some kind of support?

Based on what I've read I am assuming the answer is no, but the archive is a really important part of storage - so odd there are no options then

Kindest
Paul

 

[Samuel Tai]

It depends if you need LTFS or not. If not, there's tar for archiving to tape devices, which will appear as /dev/sa0, if your tape drive is attached via SAS to your HBA. This is literally what tar is designed to do.

If you DO need LTFS, then things get more squirrelly. As TrueNAS Core is based on FreeBSD, this thread indicates you could make it work, with some vendor compatibility quirks. You would need to create a generic FreeBSD jail, wherein you can pkg install ltfs. You would also need to pass in the datasets you need backed up via jail mounts, and also modify the jail devfs policies to pass in /dev/sa0.

In either case, you would want to schedule the backup via cron. If using just tar you'd create the job in the UI via Tasks->Cron Jobs. For LTFS, you'd crontab -e as root in the jail.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

There's also Bacula and Amanda as general Unix backup tools including tape management, control of autoloaders, automatic schedule/retention/expiry of incrementals, etc.

Old fashioned - command line, only - but very reliable. I have been running Amanda for decades with SLR autoloaders.

Could be run in a jail and both are available as FreeBSD packages.