[CLUE-Tech] tape backups

[Ed Hill]

On Wed, 2002-08-14 at 14:12, Jim Ockers wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone know of a good *command line* only utility which lets me
> > schedule backups onto a tape backup drive?  I will be putting this on a
> > Red Hat 7.3 system, and I have a SCSI tape drive which reads 24 gig
> > tapes. Or, better yet, I already have the program cpbk that I got from
> > freshmeat a long time ago, but I noticed that it has since been pulled. 
> > Could someone tell me how to mount a tape and just read/write from it?
> 
> To write the contents of the root filesystem to a tape:
> 
> tar -cvf /dev/st0 /
> 
> To read the contents of the tape back to the root directory:
> 
> cd / ; tar -xvf /dev/st0
> 
> This is about as good as it gets, in my opinion.  Anything fancier is
> just fluff.  :)


I'll second the GNU tar recommendation.  Its *very* stable and portable
in my experience (Linux, Irix, HP-UX, Solaris, *BSD).

In terms of the "fluff" comment, there are a number of helpful GNU tar
options including "--one-file-system" and "--multi-volume" that you may
come to rely on.  For details, see the man and/or info pages.  For
instance, you can easily use the "--multi-volume" option to make backups
spanning multiple tapes.

hth,
Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD 
Post-Doctoral Researcher   |  Email:  ed at eh3.com,  ehill at mines.edu
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