Re: [Sheflug] Tape drive - backing up software?

[James Bruce <nospam [at] sheffield.ac.uk>]

cheers! i managed to write my home direcotry to it just now, which was cool. kinda leaves me wanting a graphical interface though; ive downloaded amanda and going to check that out tmrw morning, and i've tried KBackup but it keeps telling
me my tape drive rewinds itself (even if i tell it to use dev/nst0) and is therefore incompatible. i've tried the commman dump, but it isnt even found on my system (huh? i thought it was a standard linux thang)...

i guess i should be more specific; actually what i want to do *is* back up an entire hard disk - i have two disks one to run the system on and one purely for data (umm, mp3s). Its 20gb and I want to be able to just copy everyting from that disk onto tapes, though ofcourse i guess itll have to be more than one since the largest this drive'll handle is 4gb compressed. The drive is a DDS-1 hp surestore, im not sure if that clears up the compressin thing. also, im not sure about the whole hardware / software compression issue... does my tape drive automatically compress data? i wouldve assumed i had to do that through a program before writing it to the drive...

thanks for your help, sorry to keep asking questions i know im annoying :)
cheers

james

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 20:12:34 +0100
"Chris J/#6" <cej [at] nccnet.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> The tape may be a 2GB/90m tape, but if the drive is a DDS-DC rather than a 
> plain DDS, then you'll have some form of compression on the tape as well. The 
> compression used in DDS is quite good and can achieve high ratios.
> 
> dump isn't really a useful tool for what you want to do - especially as you 
> don't really have the tape space - as it can only back up entire partitions, 
> rather than groups of files (its partition based rather than file-system 
> based).
> 
> I don't know what programs like Amanda are like - I tend to backup using the 
> old faithful 'tar'. It's basic operation to backup would be:
> 	tar cvf /dev/st0 <files>
> 
> Note: I use st0, rather than nst0. The 'n' device is the same as st0, except it doesn't rewind the tape. Useful if you want to use one tape for multiple dumps or multiple tars, gets in the way (meaning you need to issue an mt rewind) otherwise.
> 
> So firstly - decide what you want to back up. You won't need everything (why back up /usr/bin/ls when it can be recovered of installation CDs?)...I tend to backup configuration and home directories (ie, /etc and /home), and do this with a simple invocation:
> 	tar cvf /dev/st0 /etc /home
> 
> To extract a backup you'd use 'x' rather than 'c':
> 	tar xvf /dev/st0
> 
> OR to only pull back certain files:
> 	tar xvf /dev/st0 <file(s)>
> 
> That's the basics. I've got a nice complex backup script at work (well, a few actually) to deal with extras like tape-changers and backing up windows boxes by combining everything with smbtar.
> 
> Now -- a nice shortcut -- I think tar will default to st0 if you don't specify a file (I *know* it defaults, I j ust can't remember the default off top of me head), so you could shorten the tar invocation to:
> 	tar cv /etc /home
> and
> 	tar xv <optional file spec>
> 
> or if you don't want to see any progress output:
> 	tar c /etc /home
> and
> 	tar x <optional file spec>
> 
> Tar works well - for simple backups, its all that's needed (for complex backups its all you need as well after it's been wrapped up in a script). Amanda and the like are basically front-ends to tar and similar tools (tar is considered outdated by some people for backups, preferring cpio instead. I don't like cpio and have never had a problem with tar).
> 
> Oh - if your tape drive doesn't have compression, then tar on Linux boxes is the GNU version (cunningly enough), and you can ask tar to do on the fly compression by specifying 'z'. eg,
> 	tar zc /etc /home
> and:
> 	tar zx
> 
> Chris...
> 
> 
> -- 
> \ Chris Johnson           \  "If not for me then, do it for yourself. If not
>  \ cej [at] nccnet.co.uk        \  for then do it for the world." -- Stevie Nicks
>   \ www.nccnet.co.uk/~cej/  ~-----------------------------------------+
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