Backup to Remote Tape Drive?

[John_44]

I have a system with a dead tape drive. I have another system with a tape drive that is hardly used. Is there a way to have the system with the bad drive back up to the system with the good drive? Any help would be appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

Regards,
John

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi John:

The easist method is to use fbackup. It readily understands remote devices. Man fbackup and look under the -f device section.

You can also set up pipelines using remsh's and tar's but fbackup is faster and more straightforward.

Clay

[Sachin Patel · Accepted solution]

Hi John
Say your system name "good" has working tape drive and you want to do backup of your /home from system "dead"
#dead:\> fbackup -0v -i /home -f good:/dev/rmt/????

(0 = level 0, v = verbose, i = include directory) you can use -i more then once.

Sachin

[Deshpande Prashant]

Hi
If possible, use NFS. This will affect your network, if data is huge.

What software you are using for backups?

Prashant.

[Bill Hassell]

I would not recommend NFS for backups as there are a lot of issues with reliability (poor network means unreliable data) and compatibility (file sizes, ACLs, etc). As mentioned, fbackup uses the Unix facility called rmt (see the man page), but does require that the target system with the tape drive allows the source system to remsh to the target (ie, .rhosts).