So, a few months ago I embarked on an adventure that involved backing up our production webserver to tape. Yes, tape. A really big, hunk of magnetized plastic. It was a long trip, took way more time than one would think is necessary. First, the Powervault unit was not even powered on, go figure. Then a second trip down to the server room reveled that the SCSI cable was not plugged into the correct channel! So after all that was resolved, the trick was getting the data backed up properly. Here is how our data (that needs backed up) is laid out:

/home/clients - all of our clients web files are stored her.
/var/www/[hosted domain] - we have several hosted domains, both from a couple clients and some sites we run ourselves.

We are also making use of AutoMySQLbackup and the files that it creates need to be stored long term on the tape as well. So here is what I did…

This code keeps the latest backup on the disk for easy access as well as puts it to the tape. I try to keep a basic log file to have an idea what has been written and how large it was. I haven’t found a good way to keep a running count of how much has been written to the tape yet. Once I do, the log file will be simplified quite a bit. This script is run M/W/F and a similar script that backups only the SQL files Sa/Su/T/R.

There were a few sites that were of great help getting the tape backup working well:
http://www.whoopis.com/howtos/tapebackup.html
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-tape-backup-with-mt-and-tar-command-howto/

There was another site, which I don’t have handy at the moment, but I will update as soon as I find the link.

Backup your /home and /var/www partitions and your entire MySQL Database in one fell swoop. Put this in a bash script and run it from the directory you would like to have the two tar files and the .sql file stored. (/backups maybe?). Just make sure you do NOT have it running from any place in /home or /var/www. It will get really angry at you when it tries to add the tar file you are creating to itself!