> 
> Mind you there's getting to be little point to using tape of any kind
> for most backup purposes in all but data warehouses when one can take
> snapshots using rsync onto more disk that's now about $1/GB.  Even when
> taken off-site in carriers such disks might have more lifetime than
> equivalent physical-density tapes (so long as the disks are left powered
> down), and you don't really have move the physical disks either if you
> can get a high enough bandwidth connection to the off-site storage
> location.  With some kind of RAID at both ends you get a lot closer to
> having an effective disaster recovery plan too!  :-)

I'll put in a pitch in here for the 'rdiff-backup' package I recently
submitted:

   % cat rdiff-backup/DESCR
   Rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. 
   The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra 
   reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, 
   so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine 
   the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. Rdiff-backup also 
   preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid 
   ownership (if it is running as root), and modification times. Finally, 
   rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like 
   rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive 
   up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted.

See ftp://idiom.com/users/davids/netbsd for the package and supporting
libraries, and http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu.

David S.

>