> 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.  :)

FWIW, I think cpio (if you know how to use it) has better error-recovery
than tar.  However I've been using tar for ~10 years now and I've never
had a problem, and I've done dozens of file or system restores and 
several bare-metal system recovery/restores as well.

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/

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