Make_Recovery and cpio

[Christopher Jones_1]

Is it possible to create a make_recovery tape and append all my data files to the end of it using cpio?

The background is that I have access to a large fast tape drive and I've been asked to to create regular full system backups on to a *single* tape for DR purposes. I've also been told to use cpio but I thought it would be neat to also use make_recovery to have a bootable tape which automatically recovers the OS initially.

[Patrick Wallek]

Depending on the type of tape drive you have, this may or may not work. Unless it has changed recently, you can only boot from a make_recovery tape that was created on a DDS or DLT tape. At one point I tried an 8mm tape and it didn't work. I haven't tried anything else recently.

What you are wanting to do may work, but it would have to be a separate backup that is appended to the tape separately from the make_tape_recovery.

I'm not sure I'd risk doing something like that myself. I would just as sonn keep the make_tape_recovery tape separate so that I know it is good, and not risk screwing it up by trying to append something at the end of it.