Anyone use restic to back up to tapes?

Community
1

I was just wondering if anyone has backed up to tape drives with restic. :innocent: I haven’t tried, and am curious what others may have to say about it before I go down a rabbit hole. Obviously it’d be slow, etc etc, but… has anyone done it? Is it even possible, with some hacks maybe?

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I don’t think it’s possible. The tape devices on Linux that I’ve worked with (20 years ago or so) require a constant stream of data, similar to what tar outputs. That’s not possible to generate with restic…

3

That’s what I figured. No biggie. Could be a fun project for someone someday. :slight_smile:

4

Hi! I know that is an old thread, but do you know if there is any ongoing project about this? In our organization we have a huge tape infrastructure and we are wondering if we can use restic for something like this.

What do you think that could be a feasible approach to make restic useful for tape archiving?

Thanks!

5

I don’t think it’s worthwhile to make restic work with tapes. There are plenty of existing systems specifically designed to work with tapes. Restic has very different goals.

1 Like
6

I know, this is why I’m asking for it :slight_smile: I understand that backing-up directly on tape could be a problem but maybe having a way of archiving consolidated snapshots on tape could be more doable.

7

Other than archiving a restic repository I can’t imagine how this would work. Sorry. :wink:

8

restic now supports exporting snapshots as tape archives :wink: