LTFS support availlable

[hpcraith]

We use a Quantum Superloader 3 tape system, current running in a Red Hat Enterprise rhel v 7.9
with version 1.3.12 and QUANTUM LTFS standalone version 2.2.0. Backups are done via NFS.
Now we installed Proxmox Backup Server 2.2-6 on new hardware.
mtx and ltfs are not availlable. The currently used method is very reliable. I doubt that tape
backup system on the Proxmox Backup Server has the same functionality. Of course we intend
to move to the new system. But this requires that we need both possibilities concurrently.
Any ideas

 

[dcsapak]

hi,

sorry, i don't completely understand what the question here is.
pbs' tape backup does not make use of ltfs, but writes it's own structures to tape and needs direct access to the drives/changers

mtx and ltfs are not availlable.

what do you mean here? mtx is not installed by default but can be installed with

apt install mtx

. don't know about tooling for ltfs though (but as i said, not needed by pbs)

I doubt that tape backup system on the Proxmox Backup Server has the same functionality.

what functionality do you need? it's specifically designed to backup pbs datastores on to tape, and it's not a general tape backup solution.

 

[hpcraith]

All my tapes up to now are written with LTFS (Linux Tape File System). If a tape is mounted with
LTFS to /mnt/ltfs it behaves like a Linux Filesystem (directories and files). The tape changer is
driven by mtx. The directory structure on tape is: year -> month -> subdirektory individual files.
If I can use the ltfs and pbs tape structure in parallel I can leave current tapes as is and use
new tapes for pbs.
I have read in the documentation that one has to move the tape contents to disk again and then
work on it there. There is not much information about the pbs tape structure. With LTFS structure
it is posible to restore an individual file.

Rgds
Dieter

 

[dcsapak]

If I can use the ltfs and pbs tape structure in parallel I can leave current tapes as is and use
new tapes for pbs.

if you seperate the tapes, there should be no problem. pbs will only ever write to tapes you added to the inventory and format

I have read in the documentation that one has to move the tape contents to disk again and then
work on it there. There is not much information about the pbs tape structure. With LTFS structure
it is posible to restore an individual file.

yes, when you restore from tape you first have to write to disk before being able to restore a vm for example
(the reason is that we save the deduplicated chunks to the tape, and if we'd try to restore from there, we'd have to permanently seek on the tape, which is super slow)

it's also possible to restore single snapshots from the tape to a datastore, but it still has to go to a pbs datastore first