topic Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device in Operating System - Linux

Tar Backup on Tape Device

HP-UX 11.31 — Fri, 28 May 2010 08:52:52 GMT

Hi,

I want to take full server backup (tar) on tape device with RedHat linux OS.

Device and tape details are as below:-

*********************************************
[root@eilindex tmp]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda8 4.9G 349M 4.3G 8% /
/dev/sda1 999M 5.6M 993M 1% /boot/efi
/dev/sda2 79G 2.1G 73G 3% /data
none 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda9 3.9G 40M 3.7G 2% /home
/dev/sda3 15G 69M 14G 1% /opt
/dev/sda7 4.9G 69M 4.5G 2% /tmp
/dev/sda5 9.7G 3.6G 5.6G 40% /usr
/dev/sda4 9.7G 148M 9.0G 2% /var

[root@eilindex /]# mt -f /dev/st0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 0 bytes. Density code 0x47 (TR-5).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (41010000):
BOT ONLINE IM_REP_EN

**********************************************

Kindly help me in this.

Regards,
Ranjeet

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

Michal Kapalka (mikap) — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:18:23 GMT

hi,

what exactly ???

OS backup or data backup ( just directory structure )

mikap

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

HP-UX 11.31 — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:19:29 GMT

Hi,

I want to take all data backup.

Regards,
Ranjeet

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

Prasanth V Aravind — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:27:29 GMT

>> I want to take all data backup.

it seems you want backup of all files/dirs under root (/)

1. cd /
2. tar -cvf /dev/st0 .

if you want to take backup of particular filesystem.

tar -cvf /dev/st0 /filesystem_name

GUdluck
Prasanth

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

Nafez ALNajjar — Sat, 29 May 2010 10:12:30 GMT

Hi,

I would recommend using bzip2 compression as:

#tar -cjvf /dev/st0 /

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

Steven Schweda — Sat, 29 May 2010 14:08:54 GMT

> I would recommend using bzip2 compression
> [...]

Using a reasonably modern tape drive, with
hardware compression, I would not.

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

Nafez ALNajjar — Sun, 30 May 2010 12:40:13 GMT

>Using a reasonably modern tape drive, with
>hardware compression, I would not.

are you pretty sure that you can read 1year old tapes with new hardware ??
We have seen that is not true. We use softwrae instead.

Re: Tar Backup on Tape Device

Steven Schweda — Sun, 30 May 2010 13:55:49 GMT

> are you pretty sure that you can read 1year
> old tapes with new hardware ??

I'm quite sure that I can read my older tapes
with my newer tape drives. When I need
compatible hardware, I normally buy
compatible hardware.

> We have seen that is not true.

Perhaps you should buy compatible hardware,
instead of whatever (unspecified) stuff you
have been buying.

> We use softwrae instead.

And you have my permission to do that, but I
prefer to do things in an easy, reliable way,
which does not consume huge amounts of my
limited CPU power doing a job which many
modern tape drives can do without any
external help.