how to copy different partitions on magnetic tape with vxdump?

[montfort]

for example, you want to copy /users and /tmp
on one same tape. how assign these partitions to vxdump in one command?
it seems that vxdump is very different from fbackup which
does not aloow 'multi-tapes' copy.

[Stefan Farrelly]

You need to either use vxdump pointing to the no-rewind option on the tape, or pipe it into dd and again point it at the no-rewind option for the tape.

eg. /dev/rmt/0m will do a rewind once its written to
If you use vxdump -f /dev/rmt/0mn it wont rewind the tape, so once youve vxdump'ed /tmp you can then to the same for /users. (/users will be appened to the tape after /tmp was written) Then rewind the tape and eject it (mt -t /dev/rmt/0m rew then mt -t /dev/rmt/0m offl)

ive found vxdump not very good at estimating how much tape is available and if it needs more than 1 tape so I always pipe it into dd before writing to the tape.

[John Palmer]

Hi,

You can't get vxdump do backup two volumes in one call. Instead you run vxdump twice specifying the non-rewind tape device for output.

For example:-

export TAPE=/dev/rmt/0mn
vxdump -0 -b 64 -d 62000 -f ${TAPE} -s 99999 /users
vxdump -0 -b 64 -d 62000 -f ${TAPE} -s 99999 /tmp

results in a tape which contains two vxsump files.

You would probably want to code this into a script which probably runs vxdump within a loop. It's also worth recording a log file so that you know at what tape position each vxdump has been written.

I use vxdump (and dump for /stand) for most of my backups. Let me know if you want any more information.

Regards,
John

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

The use of graphs with 'fbackup' would easily allow including and excluding whole filesystems, directories, and/or files while creating a backup process that can be organized into one tape.

'fbackup' does support multiple tape changes. The "problem" is that it will prompt for operator intervention when a new tape is needed. If you are running fbackup as a cron job this can be addressed with a 'chgvol' script. Document #KBRC00001397 provides one such description. The 'chgvol' script uses the 'wall' announcment similarly to vxdump.

...JRF...