Is Backup on LTO Possible with Duplicati

Support
1

I need to use Duplicati for backup on LTO
Secondly I Want to have Schedule backup for SQL Databases
thirdly i Want to know wither Duplicati works With Exchange Server Databases

2

You didn’t includ any information such as what OS you’re running or what type of SQL is involved, but since you mentioned Exchange I’ll assume this is Windows based.

  1. If by “LTO” you mean Linear Tape-Open I think it depends on how it’s exposed to your system. If the LTO is exposed (and can be used) like any other attached (or mapped) drive then you probably can. Note, however, that the DEFAULT settings in Duplicati expect to have access to the already backed up files for validation (do they exist) and verification (download and verify) as well as wanting to be able to re-write existing backed up files (depending on your “keep until” settings) which may not be optimal for a linear storage system. So be sure to review parameters if you move forward with this.

  2. Duplicati CAN back up SQL files. Search for “SQL” on this forum and you’ll find a few suggestions such as MS SQL does not backup modified files (use --disable-filetime-check parameter), MS SQL database backup, and Does Duplicati support MySQL / MSSQL server database backups? (flush buffers if using VSS).

  3. I’m not sure how MS Exchange handles it’s databases so we might have to wait and see if somebody else has done this yet - or maybe you can be the first and provide us with a “how I did it” post.

Thanks for checking out Duplicati!

3

If you set something up with tapes, I would love to hear about it.

That said, Duplicati is not designed to work well with tapes, but does offer a “write-once and write-only” strategy which can work with tapes.

There is no direct LTO support, so you would have to either implement that yourself, or use a temporary storage folder that you copy to tape (like @JonMikelV suggests).

The options would be --no-backend-verification --no-auto-compact combined with --keep-versions=0 to ensure nothing is deleted, and that no files are attempted read.

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4

Hi,

If you are focused on tape, the other option to consider is LTFS. It is a technology that makes LTO look like a fileshare and is supported by newer LTO drives. However, you will need specific software to make it work.

All of the above said, there are two questions here:

  1. Can we make LTO work? The answer seems to be yes!

  2. Should I use LTO? Well this answer is more murky. Tape behaves very differently from disk and so while you can write to tape as if it is disk using LTFS, the resulting performance will be very different. It would definitely be cool to try it out and you should, but the performance might not meet your requirements.

If you do it, let us know how it goes!

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