Data is deleted and capacity recovered only if the whole tape is reformatted. If a file is modified and overwritten or removed from the volume, the associated tape blocks used are not freed up: they are simply marked as unavailable, and the used volume capacity is not recovered. In this “write once” model, files are always appended to the end of the tape. This old-school model has long been associated with the use of magnetic tape, a prime example of which is the LTO (Linear Tape-Open) standard. It’s not possible to go back and change the data that’s already been written. Once a section of data is recorded, new data is written starting where that section of data ends.

In the old school model, data is written sequentially to the storage medium. We’re highlighting Duplicity and Restic because they exemplify two different philosophical approaches to data backup: “Old School” (Duplicity) vs “New School” (Restic). In this post, we’ll discuss two popular command line and open-source programs: one older, Duplicity, and a new player, Restic. These include MSP360 (formerly CloudBerry Lab), Duplicity, Duplicacy, 45 Drives, GoodSync, HashBackup, QNAP, Restic, and Rclone, plus other choices for NAS and hybrid uses. If you take a look at our Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Integrations page, you will see a number of offerings that enable you to back up your Linux desktops and servers to Backblaze B2. The choices range from free and open-source programs to paid commercial tools, and include applications that are purely command-line based (CLI) and others that have a graphical interface (GUI), or both. Linux users have a variety of options for handling data backup.

Rclone backblaze